The Hymn Written in Famine

In 1637, the German pastor Martin Rinkart looked out over his walled city of Eilenburg and saw a community stripped of everything. The Thirty Years' War had turned his parish into a refugee camp — thousands crammed inside the walls, plague sweeping through the streets, food nearly gone. Rinkart was the last pastor standing. The others had fled or died.

That year, he buried over four thousand people. Some days he conducted forty or fifty funerals before nightfall. Among the dead was his own wife. When Swedish troops surrounded Eilenburg and demanded a crushing ransom, Rinkart walked out to negotiate, then fell to his knees and prayed aloud until the soldiers, unnerved, reduced their demands.

The fig tree had not budded. The fields produced no food. There were no sheep in the pen, no cattle in the stalls. Everything Habakkuk described had come literally true in Eilenburg.

And yet, in the middle of that devastation, Rinkart picked up his pen and wrote what became one of the church's greatest hymns of praise: Now Thank We All Our God. Not after the suffering ended — during it. Not because circumstances improved — because God had not changed.

That is the faith of Habakkuk 3:17-19. It is the defiant "yet I will rejoice" spoken not from comfort but from the ashes, by someone who has lost everything except the One who matters most.