There are two on that hillside now, about eleven feet apart, and she cuts the grass around both of them herself with a pair of shears because a mower will not sit right on that slope.
Her husband went in the spring of the year her grandson was born. Her son went four years after that, and he was forty one, and she is not going to say more about it than that in print.
She is seventy three. She has lived on that place since she was twenty.
And she has been told, in one form or another, roughly a thousand times over eleven years, that it turns around.
The Lord restores. Weeping endures for a night. She will laugh again. There is a season for everything and this season will end. A woman at a homecoming said, with tears in her eyes, that she just knew joy was coming back to that house.
They are not liars. Most of them are quoting Scripture, and the verses they are quoting are in the Bible, and she has read them more times than any of the people quoting them.
But eleven years is a long time to be told a thing is about to turn, and there is a particular kind of tiredness that sets in, and she has never found the words for it, and it is not bitterness.
The closest she has come to saying it is this, which she said once to a woman she trusted and never again: I am done being told it turns.
If that is a hillside anybody has cut the grass on, sit down on that gate a minute. There is a passage in the prophets that says a thing about this that almost nobody notices, because they always start reading it one verse too late.
Where the yet is standing
Here it is, both halves, because almost everybody quotes the second one on its own.
Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: Yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation.Habakkuk 3:17-18
Read the first half. Read all of it. Five separate failures listed one after another: the figs, the vines, the olives, the fields, the flock, the herd. That is an agricultural inventory of a place with nothing left on it.
And then: yet.
Now here is the part people miss. That yet is not standing after the harvest came back. There is no verse further down where the figs blossom. The book of Habakkuk ends three verses later and the fields are still empty when it does.
The yet is said inside the empty vineyard. It is not a report that things turned. It is a man planting his feet on the ground he is actually standing on.
You are permitted a yet that is not a forecast, and you were never obliged to predict a harvest to be a woman of faith. Habakkuk 3:17 lists five failures with no reversal anywhere after it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who ended that book with the fields still empty.
That is a completely different thing from what has been handed to her a thousand times. The people quoting turning at her are offering her a bet on the fields. Habakkuk is not doing that. He is standing in the fields as they are and naming who is with him in them.
You have not been short of faith for eleven years, and you were never required to be cheerful about a season in order to keep the Lord. Habakkuk 3:18 puts the joy in God rather than in the harvest, and the Spirit of God is not standing on that hillside waiting for a woman to expect something.
The thousand people and their verses
Now let me stand up for all of them, because you live in a county where you will be at a supper with most of them next month.
Every one of those verses they quoted is true. Weeping does endure for a night. There is a season for everything. Those are real sentences in a real book.
What has happened is not that they were wrong. It is that they were used as a timetable, and no verse in the Bible is a timetable.
A verse about a night ending is not a promise about which night. A verse about seasons does not tell anybody how many of them. When those sentences get handed to a woman in year eleven as though they contained a date, they stop being Scripture and become a schedule, and a schedule that does not arrive costs a person something every year it does not.
That is why she is tired. Not because the verses are false. Because they were given to her as a due date about a thousand times and every one of those dates has passed.
Right now, as you read this, you are not behind on a schedule, and you were never handed a date by anybody who had one to give. Habakkuk 3:17 lists the failures without predicting their end, and His Spirit has never once put a season on a calendar for anybody.
Cutting the grass with shears
Here is the thing I want said out loud, because nobody in that county has ever said it to her.
Eleven years of shears on a slope is not a woman who is stuck. It is a woman who has been keeping something for eleven years, on her knees, twice a summer, with her own hands, on ground that a mower will not sit on.
That is not grief that failed to resolve. That is a form of love that has no ceremony attached to it and that nobody drives out to watch.
Scripture has plenty of room for this. There is a woman in the Gospels who breaks a box of ointment over His feet and is criticized for it in the room, and He says that what she has done will be told wherever the gospel is preached, and the thing she did was not useful in any way anybody could measure.
There is no verse anywhere that tells a widow to stop tending a grave.
You are keeping something rather than being kept by it, and you were never stuck on that hillside. Mark 14:9 has the Lord commending an act nobody in the room could see the use of, and the Holy Spirit is at work over a pair of shears on a slope as much as anywhere in that county.
So here is where this leaves you, at a gate, on a slope, with the light coming off the ridge.
The God who is up there is not waiting for you to expect something. He has never made anticipation the price of company, and the whole book of Habakkuk is the proof, because it ends on empty fields and the man is still His.
And when He came in person He did not promise anybody's fields. He went to gravesides. He went to houses where the worst had already happened and could not be undone by the time He arrived, and He is the only one in the entire account who never once said it turns around.
He said: I am the resurrection and the life. Which is not a forecast about a farm. It is a Person, standing in front of a woman, at a grave, in the middle of a thing that had not turned.
You are stood beside on that hillside by that same Christ, and you were stood beside on both of those springs. Habakkuk 3:18 puts the joy in God with the fields still bare, John 11:25 has Him offering Himself rather than a schedule, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been on that slope for eleven years.
And I am not going to tell you it turns. Comfort is His to give, in His own way and His own timing, and eleven years that have not turned is not a report on your faith or on how much you loved either of them.
But there is a second weight and it comes off today. You have carried an accusation that was never true, that a woman who is done being told it turns has gone hard about spiritual things. Habakkuk stands in the written word as the permanent answer to it, and the Holy Spirit has never once handed anybody a due date.
If the weight ever turns dangerous up there, and staying safe genuinely comes into question for you, call or text a crisis line where you live, 988 in the United States, and tell a doctor or a counselor the plain truth about it. Getting another human being physically near you is not weakness and it is not a failure of faith. It is one honest way of refusing to be alone on a hillside.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud at the gate, with the light going and nobody on the road. The authority to speak to what has been handed to you a thousand times was given to you in Christ, and it does not rise or fall with how hopeful you sound this evening. Scripture is the ground under every line and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it. And whatever He does with the ache afterward is His to decide, in His own way and His own timing.
- Word that says it turns around, you are not comfort and you were never asked to be. Habakkuk 3:17 lists five failures and the book ends with the fields still empty, and I stop taking a true verse as a due date.
- Charge that I have gone hard, get out in the name of Jesus. The written word puts a man's yet inside an empty vineyard rather than after a harvest, and the Comforter has never once required me to expect something before He would come up here.
- Lord, You said I am the resurrection and the life, standing in front of a woman at a grave, as John 11:25 says. I thank You that You offered Yourself instead of a schedule, and I am saying out loud that this cannot be undone and that You are up here with me in it.
Habakkuk 3:17-18
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