When Nothing Comes Back

Half past six in the morning.

It’s light enough now to see the street, or the yard, or the cars in the lot. The night didn’t change the numbers. If something was missing when you lay down, the work, the money, the call that didn’t come, it’s still missing, and the day is about to start on top of it anyway.

A lot of us keep peace on the same ledger as the good things. When the money comes back, when the scan is clear, when the child finally calls, peace comes back with it. When the good things go, it goes too. It sounds like a fair deal.

There’s an old song, written by a man who had spent two chapters arguing with God, that tears that page out on purpose.

His name was Habakkuk. He lived in the kingdom of Judah, in the south of the land, a little over twenty-six hundred years ago, and that’s nearly all we know about him. No hometown, no family, no word about how his life ended. Only his name, and that he was a prophet, which in that world meant a person who carried words from God to the people. Habakkuk’s short book mostly runs the other way. It’s him carrying his own words up to God, and they aren’t polite.

It opens in the middle of a complaint.

How long, O LORD, must I call for help but You do not hear

He looks around him and sees violence, cheating, courts that don’t work, people with power crushing people without it. He’s been praying about it, and as far as he can tell, nobody’s listening.

Then he gets an answer, and it’s worse. God tells him an army is coming, the Babylonians, with horses faster than leopards, an army that laughs at walls. And it’s going to come through his own country.

So Habakkuk argues again. You’re too pure to look at evil, he says. How can you stay silent while people worse than us swallow up people better than them? Then he does something a lot of tired people will recognize. He says he’ll go stand at his guard post on the city wall and keep watch, to see what God will say back. He’s a man on watch, waiting for an answer.

The answer comes. Write it down, God tells him, so plainly a runner could read it as he passed. It will happen at its time. And then a line with a small word in it.

Though it lingers, wait for it

In this translation, that’s the first “though” in the book, and it isn’t Habakkuk’s. It’s said to him.

The book doesn’t end with the argument. It ends with a song.

Habakkuk sings about everything God has done in the old stories, the mountains shaking, the sea churned up. And then he tells you what all that did to him. It didn’t make him calm. He says his insides trembled when he heard it, his lips shook, his legs gave under him where he stood. He knows the army is still coming. He says so. He’ll have to wait for that day.

And then, still shaking, he sings this:

Though the fig tree does not bud and no fruit is on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though the sheep are cut off from the fold and no cattle are in the stalls, yet I will exult in the LORD; I will rejoice in the God of my salvation!

Read that list the way a farmer would. Figs. Grapes. Olives. Grain. Sheep. Cattle. That’s not a bad year. That’s everything a town in those hills lived on, and every line of it is empty. A zero in every column.

And he doesn’t say “if.” He says “though,” because he expects it. The army is coming through those fields. He’s not imagining a loss that might happen. He’s describing the one he can see coming.

Here’s what was still true when he wrote “yet.” Not one fig had budded. Not one animal was back in the stalls. The injustice he’d complained about in the first line was still going on in the street below. God’s answer had amounted to “wait,” and he was still waiting. His lips were still shaking. He had argued with God for two chapters, and nothing he’d asked for had come.

He said “yet” with the page still empty.

The book never says the good things came back for him. It ends right there. The army he dreaded did come, too. Babylon took Jerusalem and burned it, and the old record of that is plain about it. Whatever peace is in this song, it isn’t the kind that waits for a harvest.

There’s one more line, and almost nobody notices it, because it isn’t part of the song. It’s a note at the bottom, for whoever would be leading the music.

For the choirmaster. With stringed instruments.

This wasn’t a diary entry. It was handed to a choir. A song about every field in the country coming up empty was meant to be sung out loud, by a crowd, with music under it.

And nobody went back and cut the arguing out of his book to make him look more faithful. The complaint and the song sit side by side in the same scroll, the way they sat in the same man.

What this says about peace

It’s natural to think of peace as something the good things bring with them, so that when they leave, it leaves. In this song every column reads zero, and he writes one word at the bottom anyway.

He didn’t stop arguing to get there. He argued his way there. Peace, in this story, isn’t the good things coming back. It’s a word you can still say when they haven’t, even with your lips shaking while you say it.

This morning

Count it straight. His list doesn’t soften anything. No figs means no figs. If someone asks today how things are, and the truth is that the account is empty or the house is quiet in a way it never used to be, give one person you trust the true count. Plain numbers. No padding.

Go stand on the wall. He went somewhere on purpose to wait for an answer. Before the day takes over, give it ten minutes: the porch, the parked car before you go in, the end of the driveway. Leave the phone in your pocket. Just wait there, the way he did.

Leave the argument in. Nobody edited his complaining out. If you’re headed into a room today where only the cleaned-up version gets said, a weekly meeting, a family text thread, a table of old friends, let one honest complaint stay in the record. Say it plain, and don’t apologize for it afterward.