January: New Beginnings
Day 26 — 26 January
“Joy Does Not Need Permission from Your Circumstances”
“Though the fig tree may not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines; though the labor of the olive may fail, and the fields yield no food; though the flock may be cut off from the fold, and there be no herd in the stalls — yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation. The LORD God is my strength; He will make my feet like deer’s feet, and He will make me walk on my high hills.” Habakkuk 3:17–19 (NKJV)
They say you cannot praise on an empty stomach.
It is one of those pieces of folk wisdom that sounds self-evidently true, the kind of sentence that nods to the brutal realities of life and expects everyone else to nod along. And there is something to it. Hunger sharpens everything except gratitude. When the cupboard is bare and the pantry echoes and the last jar has been scraped clean, the idea of standing in the middle of that emptiness and opening your mouth to sing strikes most people as either delusional or cruel. You do not praise when there is nothing. You survive. You endure. You grit your teeth and get through the night. Praise is what comes after, when the shelves are restocked, when the crisis has passed, when there is something in your hand worth lifting toward the sky.
Habakkuk disagrees.
Not gently. Not theoretically. Not from the safe distance of a man who has already seen the resolution and can afford to be philosophical about the process. Habakkuk disagrees from the middle of a devastation so complete that he takes the time to catalogue it, item by item, loss by loss, as though he wants no one who reads his words to miss the scale of what he is describing.
No figs. No grapes. No olives. No harvest. No sheep. No cattle. And then, standing in the centre of that comprehensive emptiness, as though the absence itself had become a stage and the silence itself had become a drumbeat, the prophet opens his mouth and sings.
Everything Stripped
The passage operates like a slow, deliberate removal. Habakkuk does not rush past the losses. He lingers on each one, naming them with the specificity of a man who understands exactly what each absence means.
The fig tree does not blossom. The Hebrew te’enah (תְּאֵנָה, meaning “fig tree”) was not an ornamental plant in ancient Israel. It was a staple. Figs were eaten fresh, pressed into cakes for preservation, used as medicine, traded as currency in kind. A fig tree that did not blossom was not an aesthetic disappointment. It was a threat to survival. The loss of the figs was the loss of daily bread.
No fruit on the vines. The gephenim (גְּפָנִים, meaning “grapevines”) were equally essential. Grapes provided juice, wine, vinegar, and raisins. Wine in the ancient world was not a luxury; it was calories, hydration, and antiseptic in a single vessel. When the vines failed, the household lost one of its most versatile resources.
The labour of the olive fails. The Hebrew ma’aseh zayith (מַעֲשֵׂה זַיִת, meaning “the yield of the olive,” “the produce of the olive tree”) refers not just to the olives themselves but to everything they produced: oil for cooking, oil for lamps, oil for anointing, oil for medicine. Olive oil was the utility substance of the ancient economy. When the olive failed, the kitchen went dark, the lamps went out, and the skin cracked in the dry heat.
The fields yield no food. Shedemoth (שְׁדֵמוֹת, meaning “terraced fields,” “cultivated land”) describes the carefully constructed agricultural terraces that lined the hillsides of Judea. These were not wild meadows. They were engineered, maintained, laboured over, generation after generation. When they yielded nothing, the labour of years evaporated in a single season.
The flock cut off from the fold. Tso’n (צֹאן, meaning “flock,” “sheep and goats”) were the backbone of pastoral wealth. Wool for clothing. Milk for nourishment. Meat for feast days. Lambs for sacrifice and for sale. A fold without a flock was an empty pocket turned inside out.
No herd in the stalls. Baqar (בָּקָר, meaning “cattle,” “oxen,” “herd animals”) were the heavy machinery of the ancient farm. They ploughed the fields, threshed the grain, pulled the carts. Without oxen, the fields could not be worked. Without cattle, the next season’s planting was already in jeopardy. The loss of the herd was not a single loss. It was the loss of the capacity to recover from the other losses.
Habakkuk stacks these absences with the precision of an accountant conducting an audit of ruin. Fig, vine, olive, field, flock, herd. He leaves nothing out. He offers no hedge, no qualifier, no “at least we still have…” He walks his reader through the entire inventory of an agricultural society’s wealth and ticks every item off the list. Gone. Gone. Gone. Gone. Gone. Gone.
And then he pivots.
Yet
That single word, va’ani (וַאֲנִי, meaning “yet I,” “but as for me,” “nevertheless I”), is the most astonishing conjunction in the entire book.
The construction is emphatic. The vav (וְ, “and/but”) is adversative, signalling a sharp contrast with everything that preceded it. And the pronoun ani (אֲנִי, meaning “I myself”) is emphatic, unnecessary grammatically but rhetorically explosive. Habakkuk is not merely continuing a thought. He is contradicting an expectation. Everything before the “yet” said: there is no reason to rejoice. Everything after the “yet” says: I will rejoice anyway.
The verb is a’lozah (אֶעְלוֹזָה, meaning “I will exult,” “I will leap for joy,” “I will express delight with the whole body”). The root alaz (עָלַז, meaning “to exult,” “to triumph,” “to rejoice with physical exuberance”) is not a quiet word. It does not describe a measured contentment or a sober acknowledgment that things could be worse. Alaz is the kind of joy that involves your legs. It is celebration that moves. It is delight so intense it cannot stay still. When Habakkuk says a’lozah, he is describing a joy that looks, from the outside, like the behaviour of someone who has just received extraordinarily good news.
But he has received no good news. The figs are still absent. The vines are still barren. The flocks are still gone. Nothing in the prophet’s external circumstances has changed between verse seventeen and verse eighteen. The inventory of loss is identical before and after the pivot. What has changed is not the landscape. It is the orientation of the man standing in it.
The second verb intensifies the first: agylah (אָגִילָה, meaning “I will spin with delight,” “I will rejoice by circling,” “I will be glad with turning movement”). The root gyl (גִּיל, meaning “to rejoice,” “to circle in delight,” “to spin with joy”) is even more physically exuberant than alaz. In the Hebrew Bible, gyl describes the kind of joy that literally turns you around. It is dance without choreography. Movement without self-consciousness. The spontaneous physical expression of an interior reality so powerful it overflows the body.
And what is the object of this exuberant, spinning, leaping, full-bodied delight? Not a change in circumstances. Not a reversal of fortune. Not the sudden arrival of figs on the tree or cattle in the stall. The object is specified with absolute clarity: “in the LORD… in the God of my salvation.”
Habakkuk’s joy is not circumstantial. It is covenantal.
The Joy That Stands in Empty Rooms
There is a profound difference between happiness and the kind of joy Habakkuk describes, and the difference matters because most people conflate them.
Happiness is responsive. It reacts to conditions. Good news produces happiness. A full table produces happiness. A healthy child, a secure income, a relationship that is functioning well, all of these produce happiness, and rightly so. There is nothing wrong with happiness. It is a perfectly appropriate response to favourable circumstances. But happiness, by its very nature, requires favourable circumstances. Remove the conditions and the happiness departs. It cannot survive in a vacuum. It needs something to respond to.
The joy Habakkuk expresses does not require favourable conditions. It does not react to circumstances at all. It rests on something beneath and behind and independent of the inventory. It rests on the character of the One Habakkuk calls Elohei yish’i (אֱלוֹהֵי יִשְׁעִי, meaning “the God of my salvation,” “the God of my deliverance,” “the God who is my rescue”). The word yesha (יֵשַׁע, meaning “salvation,” “deliverance,” “rescue,” “the act of being brought into spaciousness and safety”) carries a remarkable range.
In its earliest usage, yesha often describes physical rescue: being delivered from enemies, brought out of tight places, given room to breathe. The root yasha (יָשַׁע, meaning “to save,” “to deliver,” “to bring into wide space”) paints a picture of someone who was compressed, confined, hemmed in, and is now standing in open ground. Salvation, in the Hebrew imagination, is not primarily about escaping a future punishment. It is about being given room to live. It is restoration to the spacious, flourishing, breathing existence that God always intended for human life.
When Habakkuk says “the God of my yesha,” he is anchoring his joy not in what God is currently doing in his visible world but in who God is in His unchanging character. The figs may fail. But the nature of the One who designed figs to grow has not altered. The fields may yield nothing. But the character of the One who spoke fields into existence has not thinned. The flocks may be cut off. But the steadfast purpose of the One who created sheep and shepherds and folds and pastures has not shifted by a fraction.
Habakkuk’s joy stands in an empty room and refuses to leave, because the room is not what the joy is rooted in. The joy is rooted in the floor beneath the room, in the foundation beneath the floor, in the bedrock beneath the foundation. The contents of the room have been removed. But the structure that holds the room has not been touched.
This is not denial. Habakkuk is not pretending the losses have not happened. He catalogued them with excruciating precision. Every fig tree. Every vine. Every olive. Every field. Every sheep. Every ox. He looked the emptiness in the face and named it accurately. And then, having named it, having honoured it, having refused to minimise a single element of it, he said: yet.
The “yet” is not the word of a man who has not noticed the emptiness. It is the word of a man who has noticed everything, including the thing the emptiness cannot reach.
Feet Like a Deer’s
The passage closes with an image so unexpected after the catalogue of devastation that it makes you read it twice.
“The LORD God is my strength; He will make my feet like deer’s feet, and He will make me walk on my high hills.”
The Hebrew for “deer’s feet” is ragley ayaloth (רַגְלֵי אַיָּלוֹת, meaning “feet of hinds,” “feet of female deer”). The ayalah (אַיָּלָה, meaning “a hind,” “a female deer”) was known in ancient Palestine for one particular quality above all others: surefootedness on impossible terrain. These animals navigate cliff faces, rocky ledges, and steep mountain paths with a precision that seems to defy gravity. Their hooves grip surfaces that would send heavier, clumsier creatures tumbling. They move where movement should not be possible.
And the phrase bamotai (בָּמוֹתַי, meaning “my high places,” “my heights”) carries a double resonance. On one level, it describes the physical highlands, the difficult, elevated, exposed terrain that requires exactly the kind of nimble, confident, sure-footed movement the deer possesses. On another level, bamot can refer to places of authority, positions of influence, vantage points from which a person can see further and stand more firmly than they could in the valleys.
After cataloguing the total loss of every visible resource, Habakkuk does not merely say he will survive. He says he will climb. He will ascend. He will walk on heights that require the kind of agility and confidence only available to those whose centre of gravity is low enough and whose grip is sure enough to handle terrain that would break a lesser creature.
But we must read this carefully. “He will make my feet like deer’s feet” could be misunderstood as God performing a new action, introducing a new capability that was previously absent. The Hebrew yesaveni (יְשַׂוֵּנִי, meaning “He sets me,” “He causes me to stand,” “He establishes me”) from the root sim/sum (שִׂים/שׂוּם, meaning “to set,” “to place,” “to establish”) describes a positioning, a placing. In context, what Habakkuk describes is the experience of being established on high ground, of discovering a capacity for navigating difficult terrain that he did not know he possessed.
The surefootedness was not injected at the crisis point. The capacity to walk on heights was part of the design from the beginning, part of what it means to be a human being oriented toward the God whose character includes deliverance, spaciousness, and the restoration of flourishing. What the emptiness did was strip away everything that had been cluttering the path. The figs, the vines, the olives, the fields, the flocks, the herds, all of it was good. All of it was legitimate. But none of it was the foundation. And when it was all removed, what remained was the foundation itself: the unchanging, ever-present, inexhaustible character of the God who is, who has always been, and whose nature includes the capacity to establish human feet on terrain they were always designed to walk.
The deer does not think about its footing. Its hooves grip instinctively. Its balance adjusts without calculation. It moves with an ease that looks, from below, like recklessness. But it is not recklessness. It is design. The deer was built for the heights. And so, says Habakkuk, were you.
Your new beginning may not look like a restocked pantry. It may not arrive with figs on the tree and cattle in the stall. It may, in fact, begin in the very place where every visible support has been removed and the only thing left is the floor, the foundation, the bedrock character of a God who has not budged. And from that stripped and silent place, something the clutter would never have permitted becomes possible. You climb. You ascend. You walk on heights you could not have reached while your arms were full of things that, however good they were, were never designed to carry you upward.
The emptiness is not the enemy. Sometimes the emptiness is the clearing. And the joy that rises in that clearing does not need permission from your circumstances, because it was never rooted in your circumstances to begin with.
It was rooted in the One who stands beneath everything that can be taken away.
And He has not moved.
Declaration
Though the shelves stand bare and the storeroom echoes and the last visible assurance has been carried off, still I open my mouth and I sing. Not because the inventory has been restocked. Not because the crisis has been resolved. Not because my circumstances have finally arranged themselves into a pattern that warrants celebration. I sing because the One beneath the circumstances has not altered, and His character is the floor my joy stands on, not the furniture that decorates the room. I am a’lozah, leaping with the whole of my body, and agylah, spinning with a delight that does not wait for conditions to improve. My salvation is not a future event I am straining toward. It is the wide, spacious, breathing reality of a God whose nature includes rescue, restoration, and room to live, and that nature has not thinned by a single degree since the last fig fell from the tree. So I climb. My feet grip the rock. My stride does not falter on the heights, because the surefootedness I need was never absent from my design. It was only obscured by the clutter of things I mistook for the foundation. Now the clutter is gone. And what remains is bedrock. Unshaken. Undiminished. Enough. More than enough. The fig tree may not blossom. The vine may stand bare. The field may yield nothing I can name. But the God of my yesha is not a crop. He is not a harvest. He is not a commodity that can be consumed by locusts or stolen by circumstance. He is the ground itself. And on that ground, with nothing in my hands and everything beneath my feet, I dance.
Strength for the Day: A Year of Encouragement for the Soul © 2026 Promise Ave. All rights reserved.
