Lamentations is a funeral. Five carefully-structured poems of grief over a city that used to be Jerusalem. The writer — tradition says Jeremiah — will not pretend the loss is smaller than it is. He does not spiritualize it. He names it. The city weeps at night with no one to comfort her. The children faint in the streets. This book does not rush to encouragement. It sits with what happened.
And then, in the middle — the dead center of the five poems, in the center of the middle poem — the grief breaks. Walter Kaiser Jr. opens his treatment of the exilic period with a single line: the worst had happened. Lamentations was written from inside that worst. It is the book of the broken faith that found, in the rubble, that God’s faithfulness was older than the rubble and not breakable by it. His compassions never fail. They are new every morning.
“New Every Morning”
The worst had happened. Jerusalem had fallen in 587 BC, and the greater part of her citizens had entered a seventy-year captivity in Babylon.
Notice what the writer does not say. He does not say the pain is not real. He does not say God was absent. He does not say it was a blessing in disguise. He says: I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall. I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me. And then — in the same paragraph, in the same breath — yet this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope.
That “yet” is one of the most honest words in the Bible. It does not cancel the grief. It refuses to let the grief cancel God. Lamentations teaches you how to hold both — affliction in one hand, hope in the other — without having to resolve them prematurely. God’s mercies are new every morning. Not because yesterday did not happen. Because the new mercy is strong enough to keep showing up in the morning after yesterday happened.
You are probably carrying a loss you cannot explain. Not a small disappointment. A thing that rearranged you. And somewhere deep you have been told — by others, or by your own tired logic — that real faith would have this figured out by now. That is not Lamentations’ posture. Lamentations teaches you to sit down in the ashes and tell the truth, and wait.
The mercy that is new every morning is not an abstract mercy. It is a mercy that meets you in the specific grief of this specific morning. It does not require you to get over what happened. It asks you to believe that God is still present in it — and to receive one more day’s worth of compassion, the way a child is fed one meal at a time.⁶⁶
What grief have you been trying to resolve or silence — and what would change if you let it sit in the open next to the mercy that is already meeting you today?
Someone in your life is in the ashes right now. They are tired of the people who showed up with platitudes. They are tired of the people who did not show up at all. What they need is someone willing to sit quietly with them and believe Lamentations’ “yet” over them when they cannot say it themselves.
You do not have to explain their suffering. You do not have to fix it. You just have to be the person who says, at the right moment and not one minute before, “his compassions never fail. They are new every morning.” Be the face they see when a new day begins. That is the ministry Lamentations teaches.⁶⁷
Who in your life is in the ashes right now — and how could you be the presence that makes tomorrow’s mercy feel reachable?
The household of disciple-makers has to learn to grieve out loud. Western Christianity often skips Lamentations — we prefer books that land on victory. But a household that cannot sit in Lamentations is a household that will be unprepared for the real losses coming. You do your people no favors by teaching them only psalms that end well.
Teach them Lamentations 3. Teach them to say yet out loud. Teach them that “great is God’s faithfulness” is not some pop Christian song but a conclusion reached in the dark, by a man who had lost his city and still got up the next morning. That is the kind of faith that holds when everything else is falling. And that is the inheritance you owe the people coming up behind you.
What loss are you asking God to explain — and what would it mean to believe his mercy can reach you there before the explanation comes?
Write about the loss you are still carrying — honestly, without spiritualizing it. Then write “Yet this I call to mind…” and finish the sentence in your own words.
⁶⁵ Walter C. Kaiser Jr., The Promise-Plan of God (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008), Chapter 10: The Exilic Era.
⁶⁶ “The Fruit of the Spirit: Patience,” vimeo.com/kathykoch.
⁶⁷ “The Fruit of the Spirit: Love,” vimeo.com/kathykoch.