There are Scriptures I know, and then there are Scriptures that have become woven into the very fabric of who I am.
Habakkuk is one of those for me.
In June 2012, my son Jake and I were a couple of weeks into an eight-week stay in Guatemala, and we were struggling. We were homesick, hot and living with a lot of uncertainty about what our lives would look like when we returned home.
The day before, we had been at church. Jake couldn’t understand the sermons because they were in Spanish, so he usually spent that time reading his Bible. Before the service started, I asked what he was going to read.
According to the blog I wrote the next day, he jokingly answered, “Maybe I should read this… hay-bike-ck book.”
Habakkuk. 😂
He actually read Matthew that day, but apparently his little joke stuck with me. The next day, while these two extremely homesick people were sitting in a hot house with nowhere to go, I suggested we do his laundry and then read Habakkuk together.
So we did the laundry, hung it outside because there was no dryer, cleaned our room and sat down with our Bibles.
I opened us in prayer.
When I recently went back and found the blog I wrote that day, I had forgotten exactly what that prayer looked like. Fourteen years ago, I described it this way:
“Only tears came out with some words mixed in.”
I prayed about wanting to go home. I prayed about wanting what was familiar and comfortable. I wanted God to use me, but I was also struggling with how uncertain my life felt.
Then we started reading.
Jake read Habakkuk’s words. I read the Lord’s.
And somewhere in that conversation between Habakkuk and God, I found the words I needed.
Habakkuk 2:3 talks about a vision meant for a future time: “If it seems slow in coming, wait patiently.”
I had never read the entire book of Habakkuk before that day, but sitting there in Guatemala without a clue what came next for us, those words felt like they met me exactly where I was.
And here’s the part that gets me now.
I wrote about it that same day.
In that old blog post, I wrote about the seasons when we face depression and uncertainty and can’t see an end to what we’re walking through. Then I wrote something fourteen-years-later me still needs to hear:
“All the uncertainty facing both Jake and I… is not uncertainty to the Lord.”
The woman who wrote that had no idea what was coming.
She didn’t know where she would live when she returned to the States. She didn’t know what the next chapter would look like or how many times over the next fourteen years she would find herself waiting on God again.
She just knew that her uncertainty wasn’t His.
And somehow, that was enough.
That day, Habakkuk 2:3 became my verse.
I didn’t know it yet, but the verse right before it would eventually become just as important.
And it would find me when it was finally time to write.