Though the Fig Tree Does Not Blossom

Coy is the one who is going to lose it, and he did not do anything.

That is the whole sentence and it has taken him about two years to be able to say it without something happening in his throat.

Four generations. His great-grandfather started it and his grandfather nearly doubled it and his father held it through a bad stretch in the middle, and Coy has worked it since he was eleven years old and has never been anything else and never wanted to be.

And it is going.

Not through a scandal. There is nothing to confess. The prices did what the prices did, and then the weather, twice, and then the loan that was fine became the loan that was not fine, and there is a man from the bank who is decent about it and has been decent about it for eighteen months and that somehow makes it worse.

He has been over it a thousand times looking for the mistake.

There are three or four decisions he would make differently, and he has taken each of them apart at four in the morning until there is nothing left of them, and the honest verdict is that none of them are it. They are ordinary decisions that a careful man makes and that would have been fine in a different five years.

So he is left with the thing that has no handle on it: it is going, and it is going while he is holding it.

Three men kept it. He is the one it goes on.

He said that out loud to his wife once, in the truck, and she did not say anything for a bit and then she said, "That is not the same as you losing it."

And he said, "It is exactly the same. It is just kinder."

He was going through papers in the spring because the bank wanted things.

Boxes in the back room, going back further than anybody has looked in decades. And in among them are his grandfather's ledgers, in that hand, with the columns ruled by hand.

And in one of those years the numbers are worse than Coy's.

Much worse. Two years running. There is a page where the man has written a figure and then written it again underneath, as though he wanted to see it twice.

Coy has never heard one word about that year. Not from his father, not from anybody at any table, in forty-nine years.

It does not save him. He wants to be clear about that with himself, because there is a version of this where he tells you it changed everything and it did not. The arithmetic is the arithmetic.

But he sat in that back room for a long time, because he had thought he was the only man in that family who had ever sat at that table with a figure he had to look at twice.

Now let me ask you whose watch you think it is.

Because if this is yours, there is something going that you did not break, and you have been quietly holding a trial in which you are the only defendant, and the verdict comes back not guilty every time and it never once helps.

The word at the end of the sentence

Habakkuk starts his book with a complaint and he does not get an answer to it.

He asks God how long, and why He tolerates what He tolerates, and God's reply in the middle of that book is not an explanation. It is a statement about who God is and what He is doing, and a line that Paul would use twice: the righteous will live by his faith.

The reason Habakkuk asked for is never given.

And then, at the very end, the man writes this.

Though the fig tree should not blossom and there be no fruit on the vines, though the yield of the olive should fail and the fields produce no food, though the flock should be cut off from the fold and there be no cattle in the stalls, yet I will exult in the Lord, I will rejoice in the God of my salvation.Habakkuk 3:17 to 18

Read the first part slowly, because people quote the second and skip it.

No blossom. No fruit. The olives fail, and olives were the long game, the thing a man planted for his grandchildren. The fields produce nothing. The flock is gone out of the fold and there is not one animal left in the stalls.

That is not a hard year. That is everything a family in that place had, listed one item at a time, all of it gone.

He is not being brave about a difficult season. He is standing in the ruin of a farm and naming each empty thing on purpose, out loud, in order.

And then he says yet.

So hear this said over you, in a back room with your grandfather's ledgers open. You are allowed to name every empty thing out loud without that being unbelief, and you are able to say His name in the same breath, and the man who wrote this never got his question answered either. That is written at the end of a book that opens with a complaint God does not explain, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the Comforter given to us, and He is at work in a man who is doing arithmetic at four in the morning.

Now let me be careful, because there are two things I could say here that would be cruel.

I am not telling you it is going to be all right.

I do not know that. The prices are the prices and the loan is the loan, and a man in an article is not in a position to make promises about your land, and if I did you would hear it for exactly what it was.

And I am not telling you God arranged this to teach you something.

I do not know that either, and nobody does, and this site has a rule about it: we do not supply reasons for a specific loss. Not yours, not anybody's. What I can tell you is that He is working, which is not the same as knowing what He is doing, and the difference between those two is the whole of where you are living right now.

Here is what I actually want you to take.

Habakkuk names the losses first.

He does not skip to the yet. He does not spiritualize the empty stalls or find a bright side for the failed olives. He counts them, all six, in a list, and the list is in the Bible in full, and God let it stand.

You have been trying to get to the second half without the first. Everybody around you wants you at the second half, because a man at the second half is easier to be near. And so you have been carrying the naming on your own, at four in the morning, where it does you no good at all.

Say the list. That is not weakness and it is not a lack of trust. It is what the passage does.

And then say the word after it, which is a small word and does not require you to feel anything.

The word says the righteous live by faith, which is a way of living and not a level of feeling. And the Spirit of God is the one who helps in our weakness, because we do not know how to pray as we should, and a man with no words left for the bank certainly does not have words left for God, and that verse was written for exactly him.