Bonhoeffer's Watch Post

In April 1943, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was led into a concrete cell at Tegel Prison in Berlin, surrounded by the very injustice Habakkuk had lamented three millennia earlier. For years, he had watched the Nazi regime devour justice, twist the law, and silence the righteous. He had cried out from pulpits, in underground seminaries, through smuggled manuscripts — How long, Lord?

Yet Bonhoeffer did something remarkable in that cell. Like Habakkuk climbing to his watchtower, he took up his post. He wrote. He prayed. He ministered to fellow prisoners and guards alike. He composed poems and theology that would outlive his captors by generations.

In his letters to friend Eberhard Bethge, he wrote of learning to see life "from below" — from the perspective of the suffering and the powerless. He did not pretend the darkness was not real. He refused to offer cheap comfort. But he also refused to abandon his watch.

Bonhoeffer was executed at Flossenburg on April 9, 1945 — just two weeks before the camp's liberation. He never saw the vindication. But the vision he faithfully recorded did not prove false. It came, as the Almighty promised Habakkuk it would. His words have strengthened the faith of millions.

Sometimes God calls us to write down the vision and wait — not because the answer is not coming, but because faithfulness itself is the answer. The righteous shall live by faith.