The Cellist of Sarajevo

During the siege of Sarajevo in 1993, mortar shells had reduced the city's beloved National Library to a smoldering skeleton. Bread lines became killing fields. The marketplace where families once haggled over tomatoes became a crater. Vedran Smailovic, principal cellist of the Sarajevo Opera, had watched twenty-two of his neighbors die in a single shelling while they waited for bread.

The next afternoon, Smailovic carried his cello to that same crater, still dusted with ash and glass. He wore his full concert tuxedo. And for twenty-two consecutive days — one for each neighbor lost — he sat in the open street and played Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor while snipers positioned themselves in the hills above.

He had no audience. He had no safety. He had no guarantee he would finish the piece. But he played anyway, because beauty was the only defiance he had left.

This is the faith Habakkuk describes. The fig tree is bare. The olive crop has failed. The stalls stand empty. Every measurable blessing has been stripped to nothing. And yet — "yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior." This is not optimism pretending things will improve. This is a man dragging his cello into the ruins and choosing to play. The Sovereign Lord does not promise to refill the stalls. He promises to become the strength in your legs when the ground gives way beneath you, making your feet sure as a deer's on the high places.