Grief has a way of convincing you that what you feel now is what you will feel always. Lamentations 3 speaks straight into that.
The book was written over the ruins of Jerusalem. The city had been besieged and burned, its people killed or carried off, and the poet does not soften any of it. Chapter 3 opens with a man describing his own suffering in close, bitter detail. Then, partway through, he turns. He remembers the Lord’s loving devotion and mercies that are new every morning. He says it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. And then he says the Lord will not cast us off forever.
The word doing the work there is forever. The poet does not claim the grief is small or that it will be over soon. He even says plainly that God causes grief. What he will not say is that grief gets the last word. Compassion follows, according to God’s abundant loving devotion, and God does not afflict anyone willingly. Sorrow is real in this chapter, and so is the fact that God takes no pleasure in it.
Maybe it has been eight months since the funeral. People have stopped asking how you are. You are back at work, doing the dishes and paying the bills, and then a song in the grocery store undoes you in the cereal aisle. You wonder whether this is simply your life now.
This passage does not give you a date when it will lift. It gives you something sturdier than a date, which is the character of the One who holds the timeline. He is not indifferent to your grief, and He is not content to leave you in it.
Waiting quietly, in Lamentations, does not mean pretending. The whole book is loud with honest sorrow. You can wait and weep at the same time.
Today, write down one sentence about your loss that you have not said to anyone. Say it to God in prayer. Then read these three verses again slowly, and let the word forever sit next to what you wrote.
