Dancing on Empty

In 2010, Haitian worship leader Dieumème Noelliste lost everything in the Port-au-Prince earthquake — his home, his church building, three members of his congregation. For two weeks he slept under a tarp made from a bedsheet, eating rice handed out by relief workers. His piano was buried under rubble. His songbook was gone.

On the third Sunday after the quake, Dieumème gathered what remained of his congregation in a dusty parking lot. He had no instruments, no hymnals, no offering plates, no roof. He stood before forty people sitting on cinder blocks and overturned buckets, and he began to sing. Not a lament — a praise song. His voice cracked, but he kept singing, and one by one, his people stood and joined him. Some of them were barefoot. Some were bandaged. All of them were hungry.

A journalist watching from across the street later wrote, "I have covered war zones and disasters on four continents. I have never seen anything as defiant or as beautiful as those people singing."

That is the theology of Habakkuk 3. The fig tree does not bud. The vines are bare. The fields yield nothing. The stalls stand empty. And yet — "yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior." This is not denial. It is the deepest kind of faith: praise that does not depend on circumstances, but rests entirely on the character of the Almighty. The Sovereign Lord remains our strength, even when every other support has been stripped away.