Love in Times Past
If you are looking for something more substantial by way of a divine revelation one place where you may expect to find it is the act of Sunday worship or, in Habakkuk’s case, the temple. He goes there every week. It is a place of hope and despair. Hope, because it encompasses the whole of his faith in God. Despair because it often seems remote from the problems he is living with and nothing seems very different either when he is there or when he has left.
Then, one day, it’s different. Imagine him sitting there and suddenly realising something is happening, but not at all what he expected. It seems to have been during the singing of a psalm. He had sung it many times before but on this occasion it seems to dawn on him for the first time that God has seen it all before — nations at war, plague, disease, natural disaster, foreign armies and interventions, seas, rivers, wild horses, quarrels and squabbles between people at all levels. All his adversaries are there. Many of them always had been. Yet God has always saved his people and Habakkuk sees that he had become so obsessed with his own particular situation that he almost failed to notice. Running on automatic pilot he had failed to realise how far off course he had strayed and allowed things to get distorted or out of proportion.
Help often comes not in miracles or divine intervention but in the realisation that some of the trouble and often part of the solution lies in ourselves. Seeing it may change nothing ‘out there’ but can certainly change our attitude and our capacity for handling it.
In Habakkuk’s case it was in the singing of a good old hymn but it doesn’t have to be. It may be something special nearer home — a picture, a souvenir, a memory, a place — which suddenly surprises us with a feeling of peace, hope, contentment, inspiration. A reassurance of the love of God in days gone by, it now lifts us out of the present, above the noise of sin and strife, to the place we hear the voice of the Son of Man.