The Father Who Sang Through the Storm

In 1994, a tornado swept through Goshen United Methodist Church in Piedmont, Alabama, during Palm Sunday worship. Twenty people died. In the wreckage that followed, rescue workers found a father named Dale Clem kneeling in the rubble, cradling his four-year-old daughter Hannah. She had survived. Witnesses said that when they pulled debris away, Dale was humming — not a hymn exactly, just a low, steady sound pressed against the top of her head. He had curled his whole body around hers when the roof came down, and somewhere in the roaring darkness, he had started to sing. Not because the danger had passed. Not because everything was fine. He sang because his child was terrified and his voice was the only shelter he had left to give.

Zephaniah understood this. His prophecy opens with devastating judgment — God sweeping away everything from the face of the earth. For two and a half chapters, the storm rages. Then comes verse 3:17, and the tone shifts so dramatically it almost gives you whiplash. The Almighty, the same God who thundered in judgment, is now described as a father holding His people close, quieting them with His love, rejoicing over them with singing. The Hebrew word for "quiet" here — yacharish — carries the sense of being still with deep emotion, the way a parent goes silent with overwhelming tenderness.

God does not sing over us because the storm is finished. He sings because we are His.