Verse of the Day for December 20

Count the losses in verse seventeen. No blossom on the fig tree. No fruit on the vine. The olive fails. The fields yield nothing. The flock is gone. The stalls are empty. Six things, one after another, like a farmer walking his land and finding every corner bare.

Nobody throws a party for a failed harvest. There is no audience for this kind of loss, just a man standing in an empty field at evening.

Then one word. Yet I will rejoice in the LORD. Not because the fields came back. They did not. He rejoices in the God of my salvation, who was still there when everything else had gone.

And something odd happens at the end. A note for the chief singer on my stringed instruments. The private prayer of a man alone in a ruined field was handed to the choir. What nobody noticed became a song sung for centuries.

Maybe your loss is the quiet kind. A business that slowly closed. A friendship that faded. If no one has noticed, God has. Say your own yet tonight, at the bedside or on the walk home.

Joy in God can stand where the harvest did not.

Your quiet faithfulness may become someone else's song.