The Garden After the Hurricane

In September 2017, Hurricane Maria tore across Puerto Rico with 155-mile-per-hour winds. In the mountain town of Utuado, María Elena Rodríguez stood in what had been her family's coffee farm for three generations. Every plant was stripped bare. The terraced hillside looked like a wound — soil exposed, shade trees snapped, the careful work of decades scattered across the valley floor.

For weeks, no help came. Neighbors wept openly. The children asked when things would be normal again. María Elena told a reporter she walked the ruined rows each morning anyway, praying aloud the same words: "Come back to us. Look down from heaven and see."

She was not simply grieving a crop. She was pleading for restoration — for the God who had planted this place to turn His face toward it once more.

That is the raw, aching prayer of Psalm 80. Israel had become a ravaged vineyard, hedges torn down, devoured by every passing beast. The psalmist does not offer solutions or bargain with the Almighty. He simply cries out the refrain that beats like a pulse through the entire poem: "Restore us, O God of hosts; let Your face shine, that we may be saved."

Three years later, María Elena's farm bore fruit again — not because the storm never happened, but because the One who first planted the vine had not abandoned the hillside.

When God turns His face toward His people, what was devastated begins to grow.