“O Lord, How long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear?” (Habakkuk 1:2).
I have prayed this so many times. How often we feel the same, wondering why God does not step in and answer our prayers. Where is he? Does he care? Yet, God is about so much more than what we see and feel. His work is everywhere and from eternity to eternity.
Later in Habakkuk 3:19, we read, “God, the Lord, is my strength; he makes my feet like the deer’s; he makes me tread on my high places.”
Rather than smooth our path, he may give us the ability to walk it.
So, when we struggle with the “how long, Lord,” remember this:
- God is sovereign and working in ways we cannot see.
- His greater work may be changing us…not our circumstances.
I have found that when I falter it is usually because there is something I am not seeing about God, or something I am refusing to believe.
In difficult times may our response be like Habakkuk’s: “Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls,yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation.” Habakkuk 3:17