Though the Fig Tree Does Not Blossom

Three things went in fourteen months and she is expected on the platform on Sunday.

The job in March, which was a restructure and was not personal and has taken something out of her anyway. The plan in July, which is the one she cannot talk about at all and which she had held for eleven years. And in November a friend, not to death, to a slow thing with no argument in it, which is somehow worse and is much harder to explain to people.

And she sings. She has sung on that platform for nine years and she is good at it and it has been the truest thing in her life.

Now there is a set list that arrives on a Thursday and she reads it on her phone in a car park, and it is all goodness. Every song. Every line. And she is not objecting to any of it doctrinally, because she believes every word, and that is what makes this so difficult to say to anybody.

She believes it. She cannot see it.

And on Sunday she will stand in front of a room and open her mouth about the goodness of God and there will be a fourteen-month-long gap between what she is singing and what is actually in front of her, and she has started to feel that standing in that gap is a kind of lying.

The prophet lists the empty fields first

Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labor of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation (Habakkuk 3:17 and 18).

Count what he names before he gets to the word yet.

The fig tree. The vines. The olives. The fields. The flock. The herd.

Six. Six things gone, listed one at a time, in a prophecy, out loud, and not one of them is softened or explained. He does not say the fig tree is being pruned for a better season. He does not suggest the empty stalls are a hidden mercy. He counts them.

Whatever that man is doing at the end of the verse, he has earned the right to do it by naming the whole of what is not there first.

You are permitted to say the whole list before you say anything else. That is precisely what the prophet does, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an honest inventory into worship rather than complaint, because Scripture says God desires truth in the inward parts.

The gap is not lying

Now let me take something off you before Sunday, because you are carrying it into a car park every Thursday.

You have concluded that singing about a goodness you cannot see is dishonest. That is a serious conscience at work and I respect it, and it is wrong, and here is why.

Habakkuk is not describing what he sees. He is describing what is true. Those are two different reports and he gives both of them in the same sentence, in that order, and the second one does not cancel the first.

Singing would only be lying if the songs claimed your fields were full. They do not. They claim God is good. And you believe that, and you said so, and belief in a thing you cannot currently see is not dishonesty; it is the actual definition of faith given in Hebrews.

You are not lying when you sing something true that you cannot see. The word says faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen (Hebrews 11:1), which is a sentence built precisely for the gap you are standing in, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an unseen thing carry weight in a body standing on a platform.

What is missing on Thursday

And now let me say the thing I actually think is wrong, and it is not you.

What is missing is not your faith. It is the first half of Habakkuk's sentence.

That set list has the yet and none of the fig trees. It goes straight to rejoicing without ever letting a room say out loud what is not there, and a person who has lost three things in fourteen months cannot get from silence to rejoicing in one move, because the prophet himself did not.

So you are being asked to do in one step something Scripture does in two, and the strain you feel on a Sunday is the strain of a missing step and not a failing faith.

You are able to take the first step in private even when the room only sings the second. The word gives the whole sentence, both halves of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a person across the yet, which is not a distance anybody crosses by effort.

And I will keep it honest, because you would know. Nothing here says the job comes back, or the plan, or the friend. I have no word about any of the three and I will not invent one. What is settled is that the prophet counted six empty things before he rejoiced, and that you may count yours before you sing.