Wang Mingdao and the Empty Field

In 1955, Chinese pastor Wang Mingdao stood in a Beijing courtroom and watched everything stripped away. His church on Shi Cha Hai hutong — shuttered. His printing press — confiscated. His congregation of several hundred — scattered. The government demanded he join the Three-Self Patriotic Movement and submit his preaching to state approval. He refused.

What followed was twenty-three years in prison. His wife, Jingwen, served alongside him in a separate facility. They lost their home, their ministry, their health, and their place in the world. Fellow pastors who compromised walked free while Wang Mingdao broke rocks in a labor camp, his eyesight failing, his body wasting.

Yet those who visited him after his release in 1980 found something inexplicable. The eighty-year-old man was not bitter. He was not defeated. He spoke of the faithfulness of the Almighty with the quiet confidence of someone who had tested that faithfulness in the darkest furnace and found it unbreakable.

This is the defiant faith Habakkuk declared — though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, "yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior." Habakkuk's "yet" is not denial. It is the most clear-eyed word in Scripture — spoken by those who have lost everything and found that God alone is enough.