BackstageThere is a little book near the back of the prophets that most people never read, and it ends in the strangest possible place. It ends with a song. Not a sermon, not a warning, not a prediction — a song, with a note at the very bottom of the page telling the worship leader to perform it with stringed instruments.
What makes it strange is what the man had just been looking at.
Habakkuk was not writing from the harvest. He was writing from the ruin of it. He had spent the whole book arguing with God about violence and injustice and the terrifying news that worse was coming before anything got better, and by the end he has stopped arguing and started to describe, plainly, the world he expects to wake up in. The fig tree will not blossom. There will be no fruit on the vine. The olive crop will fail and the fields will produce nothing to eat. The sheep will be gone from the pen and there will be no cattle in the stalls. He is describing total agricultural collapse. He is describing a country with nothing left to put on the table.
And right there, in the middle of that inventory of loss, he writes the word that has kept people alive for twenty-five hundred years: yet.
Yet I will rejoice in Yahuah. Yet I will be glad in the God who saves me.
And then, having sung that into the teeth of the famine, he does something that tells you everything about what kind of man he was. He hands it to the musicians. He marks it for the choir. He wants it sung out loud, with instruments, by the whole gathered people — this song written in the worst season of his life, about a harvest that is not coming.
Praise you cannot sing in a good year
I have thought about that for a long time, up on the high ground where I do most of my thinking, and I have come to believe this. There is a kind of praise you cannot learn in a good year. It is simply not available to you when the fig tree is heavy and the stalls are full, because in a good year your gladness and your circumstances are pointed the same direction, and you cannot tell which one you are actually worshiping.
It is only in the famine that the two come apart. It is only when the field is bare that a song of joy becomes an act of pure allegiance, because now the song is not agreeing with your eyes. Now the song is defying them. When Habakkuk sings yet, he is saying: I have looked at everything I was counting on, and it is gone, and I am going to rejoice in the One who gives it anyway, because He was always the harvest underneath the harvest.
That is why the weathered ones are the ones you want to sing beside. The people whose worship has been up above the tree line, where the easy supply runs out and the air gets thin, whose praise has been rained on and frozen and dried out and is still standing — those people are not singing because things are going well. They learned, somewhere in a bare season, to sing on purpose, against the evidence, and that praise has a strength in it that no good year could ever have produced.
Feet made for the heights
And then comes the last line, and it is the one I carry with me on every climb.
God the Lord is my strength, Habakkuk sings. He makes my feet like the feet of a deer. He sets me on my high places.
If you have ever watched a mountain deer — a chamois, an ibex, one of the wild goats that live where nothing sensible would — you know what an outrageous claim that is. They stand on ledges the width of your hand, on faces of rock so sheer that just looking makes your stomach turn over, and they are calm up there. They graze on cliffs. They cross gaps that would kill you without breaking stride. The thin air that leaves a man gasping is simply the air they breathe. They were made for the heights. Their whole body is built for the exact terrain that terrifies everything else.
And Habakkuk, looking at his ruined country, says: that is what God does to a person. He does not, in that moment, promise to refill the barns. He does not undo the famine. He does something better and stranger — he changes the man's feet. He gives him the poise of a creature built for the drop. He sets him up where the footing is impossible and makes him steady there.
Notice that the strength is given, not summoned. Habakkuk does not manufacture the deer's feet by trying harder. He receives them. God the Lord is my strength — the surefootedness is a gift, handed to a man in the exact season he needs it and could never have produced it. You do not grit your teeth into steadiness on the heights. You are made steady, by Someone, in the place you would otherwise fall.
Sing it before the fig tree blooms
So here is what I want you to hear, if you are reading this in a lean year.
You do not have to wait for the harvest to come back before you can sing. That is the whole scandal of the song Habakkuk handed to the choir. He sang it while the fields were still bare. He set his joy to music while the loss was still total. And he was not lying and he was not pretending — he had simply found the ground under the ground, the strength under the strength, the God who is Himself the portion when every other portion fails.
If you can only praise when the vine is heavy, your worship is at the mercy of your weather, and your weather will not always be kind. But if you can learn to sing yet — into the empty field, into the quiet house, into the year that took more than it gave — then you have found the footing that no drought can take from you. You have been given the feet of the deer. You have been set, on purpose, on your high places.
The fig tree may not have blossomed. The stalls may be empty this morning.
Sing it anyway. Set it to music. Hand it to the whole gathered people and let them sing it too. The One who is your strength has not failed, and He is already changing your feet for the climb.
