Songs from the Underground Cell

In 1948, Romanian secret police dragged Pastor Richard Wurmbrand into an underground prison cell in Bucharest. For three years, he lived in solitary confinement thirty feet below the earth — no window, no book, no calendar, no human voice. The Communists had stripped everything: his pulpit, his congregation, his wife Sabina, his son Mihai. He did not know if his family was alive or dead.

The guards expected silence. Instead, they heard singing.

Wurmbrand later described those years as some of the richest of his spiritual life. With nothing left — no Bible, no fellowship, no freedom — he composed hundreds of sermons in his mind. He tapped hymns in Morse code through the prison walls. He danced alone in his cell, worshipping the God who remained when everything else had been confiscated.

"Alone in my cell, cold, hungry, and in rags, I danced for joy every night," he wrote in Tortured for Christ. Fourteen years of imprisonment could not rob him of the one possession no government could seize: his joy in the Almighty.

Habakkuk understood this arithmetic of faith. When the fig tree is bare and the stalls stand empty — when every earthly support has been pulled away — what remains is not despair but a defiant, holy gladness. "Yet I will rejoice in the Lord." That three-letter word, "yet," is the hinge on which all genuine faith turns. It is the song that rises when every reason for singing has been taken away.