The Empty Barn That Held Everything

Martin Edsel planted his last seeds in April 1988 with borrowed money and a prayer. By August, the Iowa fields that had fed his family for three generations had turned to cracked, gray dust. The corn never came. The soybeans withered before they set a pod. When the bank called in October, Martin walked out to his empty barn, sat down in the straw, and did the only thing he could think to do.

He sang.

His wife Ruth found him there an hour later, tears running into his beard, singing an old hymn about the goodness of God. She sat down beside him in the straw and joined in.

"I don't understand it," he told her afterward. "I have nothing. The crops are gone. The loan is called. But I felt something in there — like my feet were planted on solid rock instead of dust."

Habakkuk knew that feeling. He wrote his prayer at the edge of national collapse — no figs, no grapes, no olives, no grain, no sheep, no cattle. Every system his world depended on had failed simultaneously. Yet he chose to rejoice not in what the Almighty had provided, but in who the Almighty was. The Sovereign LORD became his strength precisely when his own strength had run out.

That is the deepest kind of faith — not gratitude for the harvest, but worship in the empty barn. Not joy because of what we hold, but because of who holds us. And somehow, in that bare place, God makes our feet like the feet of a deer — sure-footed on the heights.