Rooted · Week 1 · Friday

Yet I Will Rejoice

He lost the thing he had spent years building, and on the worst night of it, he chose to sing.

Not because he felt like singing. Everything he had worked for was coming apart in his hands, the plans, the security, the whole picture of the future he had been so sure of. By every reasonable measure it was a night for despair, and a large part of him wanted nothing more than to give in to it and let it swallow him whole.

He chose to praise. Not because he felt it.

Instead, he found himself thinking about a prophet named Habakkuk, who stood looking at total ruin, empty fields, dead vines, barns with nothing left in them, the animals gone from the stalls, and said something that sounds almost outrageous when you really hear it.

Though, and Yet

Two words carry that whole passage. Though, and yet. Though everything is gone, yet I will rejoice. It is not denial, and it is not a man pretending the loss does not gut him. Habakkuk names the ruin honestly, item by item, and then makes a choice in spite of every bit of it. Praise offered up in the middle of the storm, not because the feeling is there, but as a deliberate act of trust that God is still good even when the harvest is a total loss.

The One Thing the Storm Can’t Take

So that is what he did. He chose to praise. Out loud, standing in the wreckage of it, with tears running down his face the whole time. Nothing about his circumstances changed that night. The loss was just as real in the morning.

But something in him changed. Because praise chosen in a storm is joy in its very purest form. Remember what joy actually is. It is not happiness, which had left him days ago. It is the power to endure that fills you with hope. And that kind of joy is the one thing the storm can never strip away from you, because you are not feeling it, you are choosing it, on purpose, right in the teeth of the wind.

The fig tree is bare. Yet. That single word is where the rooted stand. The storm doesn’t get to decide who you become.

Tomorrow · Rooted · The Week in Review