When We Lose What We Have Built

Transcript is automatically produced. Errors may be present.

Good morning again. My name’s Alex Wall and I’m still the pastor here at South. And it’s great to see you today. We’re in a series that’s moving towards Pentecost. In a couple of weeks we’ll celebrate the festival of Pentecost, this moment where the spirit is given to the church, and we’ll do it with baptisms.

If you’ve never taken this journey of baptism before, I forgot I’m on this thing now. This is my responsibility. If you’ve never taken. This journey we would love to invite you. It’s rich, it’s profound. You’ll find it to be life altering. It’s not that we believe that baptism saves you, but it does bring something distinct to your life.

And if you’ve never taken that journey, I. My encouragement is to drop onto the webpage south fellowship.org, stroke life, and just wrestle with it. Maybe this is something for you to do in the next season. And as we’re moving there, we’re in this series that, that we’ve called the things We Build.

We’re looking at the way humanity builds cities, builds families, builds organizations. We are creative. In our core, and yet we’ve probably seen ways where some of our toxicity gets into the things that we’re a part of and equally some of the ways that are good and gets involved in the things that we’re part of.

And today’s conversation is centered around the way that we respond when those things don’t go well. Today I get this privilege of talking about something that I am uncomfortable with at times, afraid of. At times distinctly move away from, because we’re gonna tap into the, to the realm of grief and loss and the pain that comes from it.

A few years ago, my daughter Elena was sat on the fence of our deck. It’s like the guardrails. And we had some neighbors when we moved to New York who were wonderful, they said to us, Hey, anytime you want the pool’s open, come over and use it. So as soon as it got to the summer and the pool opened, I was straight there at the door, like the day after Memorial Day, it may have been Memorial Day itself.

I’m knocking on the door saying, Hey. He mentioned we can use the pool. I don’t know if he expected us to come and ask, but we did. And he said, oh yeah, go around the back and you can use the pool. And then about 10 minutes later, he came out to join us and he just said, Hey, I don’t want you knocking on the door every time that you want to use the pool.

You know where the gate is. Just come and use it. So the kids would just, they’d just head over and swim. So they would sit on this big kind ledge of the deck and they’d jump off. It was about five feet or so to the ground. And as a parent you kinda learn to deal with you know what may happen when they jump, but you cautious and you’re watching. And so I’m watching as Elena gets ready to leap, and I’m looking for the spot where she’ll land when she leaps. I’m just, this is where I expect her to be. And I say, look, nothing happens. She doesn’t end up where I expect her to be. And then I look at where she’d leapt from and she jumped from the top of the deck and there was a hook.

That was designed to hold flowers and the back of her jeans had caught on the hook and she was just suspended in midair with nowhere to go. Now, as a parent, you have a couple of questions at that point. How long can I leave her there for? Can I take a picture while she’s there? Is that good parenting, bad parenting?

I don’t know. Or do you have to go and fix the situation? And to this day, I regret not taking the picture, but I did not take it. I got a got her down. The reason I tell that story is this, to me, it’s this picture illustration of somewhere, like one of the ways we describe grief. There, there is the place we were, and then there’s the place we expected to be.

And at times grief is like this holding pattern. It holds you between two things. In ancient cultures, they would leave marker stone to symbolize what was, and they’d hope to leave marker stone in the future to symbolize what had become, and grief holds you there. It’s a stopping point. This is a poem by WWH Aldon, one of the great poets of the last hundred years.

The stars are not wanted now. Put out everyone, pack up the moon and dismantle the sun, pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood for nothing now can come to any good. Do you feel the emotion in that? It’s like we, we can’t just continue as if nothing happened. Even the things that mark time, they stop in.

In this poem, the philosopher Soran Ard said this, what is a poet? Is an unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the Scion cry, pass through them. It sounds like lovely music and people flu around the poet and say, sing again soon. That is me. New sufferings Torment your soul, but your lips be fashioned as before.

For the cry, it would only frighten us, but the song, the music. That’s blissful. When you’ve heard musicians that can tap the depths of human emotions, they often come from places of experience that are broken in themselves. This is where we want to go today as we look at this book called Lamentations.

First, some background. I want to catch you up, make sure this is all making sense. We begin in the early parts of Genesis with a creation centered. Around a garden and it becomes a world dominated by cities. The quick movement is from a garden people, gardeners who live an agrarian lifestyle to cities dotted around all over the place.

And those cities are mostly bad, most of the, or many of them in that era, founded by a guy called Nimrod. One of them is simply called Great Big City, which is I dunno, if we had a city above. A mile above sea and we just called it Mile High City or something. Nothing’s really changed, still doing the same things in the pentitude.

This first five book books of the scriptures. Most cities are negative. They’re bad. The people that are presented a as good and as he are, the ones that are agrarian. They may own some land, but they dwell outside of the cities. That they’re nomadic. Often they may own cattle, they may own sheep, but most of the time they’re not living in cities.

Cities have this negative vibe to them. Cities, as we see in this narrative, become places. Of brokenness. This is the narrative around, do I have this? Actually, maybe I didn’t put this in. Oh yeah. This is the narrative. Ignore the reference. Didn’t change that. This is narrative in Genesis 18 around the city called Sodom.

Now this. Was the sin of your sister Sodom. She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed, unconcerned. They did not help the poor and the needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me, therefore I did away with them. As you have seen, we know Sodom from the story around sexuality, but in actual fact, it’s far broader.

Than that. As Ezekiel, this prophet later describes Sodom, the city of Genesis. He says, actually, some of their central problems were they did not care for the poor and needy around them. The cities that we see in these cultures are broken, and people live often in poverty. We’re kinda left with this lurking question.

Can a city ever be good? Can a city produce something of value? And then. We see the shift, this bright shining light, this city upon a hill called Jerusalem. Out of all these cities in the Old Testament, and mostly they’re negative, occasionally a city is presented well, the city of city in Egypt, where Joseph becomes the manager of the food resources.

That’s surprisingly this bright light. But often cities are presented badly and conversely, Jerusalem is the city. Of God founded by a man after God’s own heart. If you can remember for a moment, think of the genesis story. A garden with food for everybody who needs it. Ample resources available to all a way of being that’s sustainable.

And now read what’s said about Jerusalem when it’s formed as this new city of God in amongst all these other cities. This is two Samuel chapter six. So David went to bring up the Ark of God from the house of Obed Iam to the city of David with rejoicing. When those who were carrying the ark of the Lord had take it six steps, he sacrificed a ball in a fatten calf wearing a linen effort.

David was dancing before the Lord with all his might, while he and all Israel were bringing up the arc of the Lord with shouts and sounds of trumpet. There’s a celebration as God’s presence is brought into the middle. Of the city. Sounds like the garden story. And then read this after he had finished sacrificing the burned offerings and fellowship offerings, he blessed the people in the name of the Lord Almighty.

Then he gave. A loaf of bread, a cake of dates, and a cake of raisins to each person in the whole crowd of Israelis, both men and women, and all the people went to their homes. It’s a city where everybody has food to eat. Everyone has a home to live in God’s presence. Dwells in the middle. It’s eaten.

That’s what this city looks like. It’s a city of tov. The Hebrew word for good. When we look at this idea of humans are capacity to create good. Yes. While cities become broken here we see how we get to create in wonderful ways. We get to bring richness to the world around us. And the language around this city is that God loves it.

This is Psalm 46. There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the place where the most high dwells God is within her. She will not fall. God will help her at break of day. Nations are in uproar. Kingdoms fall. He lifts his voice. The earth melts. This is a psalm that was written as the armies of the Assyrians are camped around the city of David and it doesn’t fall.

The city the armies they leave. There’s no explanation for it other than God intervenes in the ass. Syrian man manuscripts. It simply says, we decided to go home. And yet in the scriptures it says that God won a victory here. But here’s where the twist happens. Jerusalem becomes just like the other cities, there’s pointers early.

Instead of becoming the city of God as it was called originally, it becomes the city of David. David’s moment of sin and brokenness becomes the moment that the city starts to move in the direction of all other cities. The picture of Eden is lost. Seems it’s not about the cities, it’s about us. It’s not the medium.

That’s the problem. W we’re the problem humans. Together we seem to gravitate towards broken stories, and that’s the reason I tell this is that’s where we’re ending up today. We’re about to enter this book, Lamentations. We’re gonna try and cover high level the whole. Of the book. It’s it’s not gonna take as long as that sounds like it’s gonna take.

But if you are an Enneagram seven, if you’re one of those upbeat souls, you should have left 20 minutes ago. It’s too late. Now we’re gonna sit in this space together. The opening words of this book, Lamentations A car. How did this happen? How will we recover? It’s a doge. It’s dark, it’s profound.

It’s contemplated that, that word appears in multiple places. In the first verse of chapters, chapter one, chapter two, chapter four, all carry this sense of like, how did this happen to us? Where did we go wrong? Lamentations is a dge for the death of the city. Something is broken here. Something’s wrong.

Now, a few notes that I would love to share with you before we get into this fir first is this. When we talk about, or when Lamentations talks about grief, it will talk often about blame. Whose fault is this? Who did this? From a engineer East perspective, there’s always an answer to that question. It’s the person themselves, it’s the parents, it’s somebody can be traced as the cause of this suffering.

And yet we know that conversation’s far more complicated than just that. Even in Jesus talks about this, he’s asked a question about a man who’s born blind. In John chapter nine, he saw a man born by born blind from birth. His disciple was asked Rabbi, who sinned this man or his parents, that he was born blind?

And Jesus replied, neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him. As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me. Now it is coming when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world. Jesus says the conversation is far more nuanced than whose fault is it?

So first. Know that while blame is in the language you get to, to remove that as appropriate. We know that times in our life we experience suffering because something we’ve done and times in our life, grief and suffering, just find us for no reason. We can we can tap into. Second idea is this.

This is Kathleen O’Connor who has brilliant commentary on Lamentations. Lamentation testimony is bitter, raw and largely unhealed. Its poems use wounded words to lu in pain and resist God’s act in the world. This is like a court case. The speakers in the poems of lamentations are asking questions like, is God fair? Is God just has God acted in a way that’s in line with His covenant with us. There’s so much like raw emotion in these poems that, that you need to see it with that lens. The, there’s a potential for loss that’s explored. CS Lewis talks about this to love at all, is to be vulnerable, love anything, and your heart will certainly be rung and possibly broken.

If you wanna make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one. That’s the place of the people of Lamentations, they’re experiencing pain because their heart has been given away. Finally, this third little thing to know before we enter into it, Lamentations is the land of metaphor, which makes sense to us because you’ve experienced grief and loss and pain.

What do you do? You go to the language of metaphor. You might say things like this. I, it was like a knife in my back. Now, rarely did you actually get a knife in your back, but it can feel like that. It felt like I was kicked. In the teeth. It was like quicksand beneath my feet. That wouldn’t be a surprise to me.

I’m a nineties kid, so I’m just surprised there’s not quicksand everywhere because it was in every movie I ever saw, I was always worried about getting caught in, in quicksand. But that language of the ground just slipped from under me. Kathleen O’Connor again says this, Lamentations is about the collapse of a physical, emotional, and spiritual universe of an entire people, not about individual sorrows except in a metaphorical and symbolic manner.

Yet the power of its poetry can embrace the sufferings of any whose bodies and spirits are worn down and assaulted. Whose boundaries have shrunk, who are trapped. And who face foreclosed futures. If you sit in a place of grief, Lamentations is a book that when you read it might just give you words for your soul.

So here we go. Lamentations verse one. How deserted lies the city. Once so full of people, how like a widow is she who was once great among the nations, she who was a queen amongst the provinces, has now become. A slave J just for a second, taking that language, how, like a widow is she who was once great amongst the nations.

The first voice of Lamentations in chapter one is a narrator. It’s someone who speaks about what he sees. He doesn’t necessarily talk about emotions, but he does talk about what has happened in the past and is happening now. He’s this guy. Y when you see the news and there’s an event that takes place and there’s that reporter on the street who’s trying to figure out what’s going on here and he’s always got the quaffed hair and he smirks a little bit because if it bleeds, it reads and he’s tapping into a story that people will be interested in.

So he’s not watching or entering into it from a place of deep emotion. It’s peripheral, it’s commentary. He’s sitting alongside people whose houses are burning down and he’s just so how much did you lose in the stuff that burnt down? Like he’s just, it’s just detailed questions that he will ask in the days of her affliction, he says, and wondering, Jerusalem remembers all the treasures that were hers of old.

He’s talking about losses measuring, like who has lost what? When a people fell into enemy’s hands, there was no one to help her. Her enemies looked at her and laughed at her destruction. Her filthiness clung to a skirt. She did not consider her future. Her four was astounding. There was none to comfort her in his language, blame is assigned.

It’s concrete it’s all her fault. Whoever she is right now, some person associated. With the city, he sees suffering and he easily points a finger and says, oh, that, that’s whose fault it is. And then look at verse nine. Halfway through or just actually at the last third, we see the language change.

Look, Lord, at my aff affliction. For the triumphed. It’s not the narrator speaking anymore. It’s a lady who represents. The city. Her name is Lady Zion, and she won’t speak about what happened before. She’ll simply speak about what’s happening now, what’s her experience of this present moment and a first cries this God.

Can you see this? Can you watch? Can you take note of me? Perhaps you’ve experienced that in your own moments of pain and suffering. Actually, some of the longing is someone would just acknowledge what is happening. There’s this way that we don’t want to see trauma, we don’t want to see pain, and so we skip over the surface of it.

And here she’s simply can I get an audience? C can guard, can you see me in the midst of this? A, as the language moves on, she almost gives up on God. In chapter one. In chapter one, it becomes about anybody seeing her. Is it nothing to you or you who pass by, look around and see? Is any suffering like my suffering?

That was inflicted on me that the Lord brought on me in the day of his fierce anger. She longs for somebody to look at. Her condition longs for somebody to sit with her. The writer, the psychologist, Kurt Thompson, says this, that the gift of a counselor and maybe one of the good takeaways from this, as you might say that there’s some pain.

I’d like to sit with somebody over, but the gift of a counselor says, Kurt Thompson is my awareness of somebody else’s awareness. Of my pain. Pain is isolating. We feel it ourselves and and the gift of someone who can sit with you and say I’m with you in this, is what’s being described Here we go back in verse 17.

To the narrator, Zion stretches out her hands, but there’s no one to comfort her. The Lord has decreed for Jacob that his neighbors become a foes. Jerusalem has become an unclean thing amongst them. She’s rejected by people. People don’t want to look at this lady Zion. And one of the fears in the midst of pain and suffering we’re told is this that you have to heal quickly because everyone will give up on you.

If you don’t heal then they’ll stop listening. If you don’t heal them, maybe even the person doing the counseling, the person who’s desire, who’s supposed to sit with you will give up on your healing. And this is what this narrator starts to say, ladies, Zion speaks again in verse 20. See, Lord, how distressed I am.

I’m in torment with him. In my heart, I am disturbed for, I have been most rebellious outside the sore briefs inside the city. There is only death. There’s this deep pain of emotion expressed right now is just awful. In chapter two, we go back and watch what happens here ’cause the writers do something super clever in this moment, verse one of chapter two, we go back to the idea of how the Lord is covered.

Door daughter Zion with a cloud of his anger. He has hurled down with splendor, the splendor of Israel from heaven to earth. He has not remembered his footstool. In the day of his anger, he talks about how the city has been rejected because it ended up like every other city, the narrator is gossiping about Zion.

It’s like that way that he has like entering into the story and he’s pushing into all the ways that the city might be flawed. Do you know how you hear gossip in those terms? It’s oh, have you heard them talking? Now I hear that the marriage probably isn’t gonna work.

Like they they’re even talking now about divorce. Oh, did you hear what he did? Did you hear what she did? This is the story behind the scenes that’s been uncovered by this narrator who speaks about daughter Zion. Bertran Russell, the philosopher notes that no one gossips about other people’s secret virtues, but this reporter feels like he has the city pegged.

And then look at verse 11 of chapter two, because something changes suddenly this rapport to who’s been really like just brutal about the city, says something else about her. My eyes fail from weeping. I am in torment within my heart is poured out on the ground because my people are destroyed, because children and infants fate in the city, in the streets of the city.

Suddenly this reporter starts to say something about her oh man, this suffering is intense. He starts to feel what she’s feeling in verse 12, they say to their mothers, where is bread and wine? As they faint, like the wounded in the streets of the city, as their lives e away in their mother’s arms, he sees the suffering of the children and starts to realize his part of this thing.

Suddenly they become closer. Together. What can I say for you? What? What Can I compare you with? Daughter Jerusalem. To whom can I liken you that I might comfort you? Virgin daughter Zion. After everything that he said, he is now saying things like Virgin daughter Zion. Your wound is as deep as the sea who can bring healing to you.

The change of view is it’s like extreme. It’s if you’re a child of the eighties, nineties, it’s like this story. Remember pretty woman, like the story of a man who hires a prostitute. It’s a business deal. And then what does he begin to say about her at the end? There’s a change in his view.

Suddenly starts using words like princess, like this is the same thing. This narrator who sees only what she has done in the past is now entering into the story in a very specific way. Arthur Frank, the writer talks about stories of extreme grief as being narrative wreckage. We don’t have anything to hold on to anymore.

Could be the death of a loved one, the loss of an organization or business that you’ve built up. Could the prognosis of extreme sickness, the diagnosis of maybe a sickness that might end in death? He says this becoming ill is a call for stories. Stories have to repair the damage the illness has done to the ill person’s sense of where she’s in life and where she may be going.

Stories are a way of drawing maps and finding new destinations. Remember that beginning. It’s a stone here that said, this is where we’ve been, and it’s where will we end up? Is there any future for me? In the midst of that, we need stories in the midst of that as a community. There are all sorts of different questions about what the future might look like.

And then comes the third voice. The third voice is what’s called a strong man. He’s someone who’s seen the intensity. He’s in chapter three. I am the man who was seen affliction by the rod of the Lord’s wrath. He has taken me away and made me walk in darkness rather than light. Indeed, he has turned his hand against me all day long.

He pierced my heart with arrows from his quiver. I became the laughing stock of all my people. They mocked me in song All day long. He has filled me with bitter herbs and given me gore. To drink. He has broken my teeth with gravel. He has trampled me in the dust. He has deprived me of peace. I have forgotten what prosperity is, so I say my splendor is gone and all that.

I hoped from the Lord. There’s this ending of any kind of preferred future. Have you ever sat in a moment and said, I’m not sure what comes after this. I don’t know how good comes from this story and I don’t know how we move on together. A whole bunch of years ago my wife and I lost a baby in the womb, and there’s this mixture of this story that makes you wonder like what the next part of the story looks like.

I remember this moment of holding this small thing and seeing these eyes. And these fingers small yet not like a baby but something that was supposed to be part of the story. I’m wondering how in that moment you move to the next thing and when you were allowed to move to the next thing.

One of the common stories with parents that experience the loss of a child is divorce. Because one person is ready to move on. One person’s grief has started to come to, its kind of not conclusion, but it’s moved to its next stage and the other person’s not ready, and you can’t negotiate that kind of change.

This is the kind of stories that Lamentations is tapping into. We had an expectation about life and now that expectation won’t be filled. What one of the great griefs in sickness is when sickness or a diagnosis of potential death comes before the things we’ve been guaranteed in life or been told we should be guaranteed.

There’s these kind of unwritten stories that we will, we’ll certainly get married and we’ll certainly have kids. And we’ll certainly have grandkids, and anything that questions those stories causes more trauma than any diagnosis. When all of those things have happened, these are the lamentation stories that it’s trying to tap into.

And then out of nowhere, watch what this strong man does. He tries to go positive. The next part becomes about hope. Because of the Lord’s great love, we are not consumed for his compassion’s never fail. They’re new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. I say to myself, the Lord is my portion and therefore I will want wait for him.

There’s all this language that suddenly is about. Hope, and the expectation from us as Western is that suddenly there’s going to be this moment where the story will swing positive. The first chapters of Lamentations have a beat and have a meter. They are an acrostic of the Hebrew alphabet. So you have the first verse, starts with Alf, and then bet, and then gimble, and then D, and it runs on.

It’s predictable. And every verse has three lines that begin with those letters. And then you move to chapter three and the pace picks up. Suddenly there’s more lines for each letter of the alphabet. If I were to give that to you in a meat, you could feel the first two chapters feel like this.

AIF Bet Gimel D AIF Bet Gui Dali. And then the third chapter changes. It’s AF aif. Bet. Bet. Bet. D it. And you can feel the energy of the poem begin to rise, and your expectation is everything’s going to come to this conclusion of joy and God’s victory and goodness for this world. And then this is what happens, chapter four, how the gold has lost its luster.

The sacred gems are scattered in every street corner. Those who want eight. Once a DCUs is a destitute in the streets. Those brought up in royal purple now lie in ash pee heaps. Those killed by the sorter, better off than those who die of famine racked with hunger. They are waste away the lack of food from the field.

Finally, at the end, after all of this, the whole city speaks about its plight and its sense of common grief. Remember, Lord, what has happened to us? Chapter five, look and see our disgrace after four chapters where everything has a rhythm and a sense of like purpose. In chapter five, the writers just throw it all out there.

There is no discernible rhythm. It’s like the energy of the poem as just God. As people sit in this space of grief, Christopher writes us this part of the horror of human suffering is to be unheard. Forgotten, nameless, thrown aside. Lamentations is a summons to remember realities endured by real people like ourselves to bear witness and to pay heed to their voice while lamentation speaks at fault.

And it does. And you get to hold that on knot in the midst of your own grief. And lemme say this, we all have grief. Some of us have great grief. It’s primary emphasis on forgottenness. It’s God, in the midst of this, have you forgotten? Me. These are the final verses of Lamentations verses so heavy that when they read them in Jewish festivals, they change them because they’re just weighty.

You Lord, rain forever. You’re thrown in jaws from generation to generation. Why do you always forget us? Why do you forsake us so long? Restore us to yourself, Lord, that we may return, renew our days as of old. Unless you have utterly rejected us and are angry with us beyond measure, that’s the end of the poem.

The end is empty. It’s this idea that as Lamentations ends, life continues in God’s absence. Have you ever felt anything like that? A question that says, where are you, God? E every time we and my family and I leave England, have a deep, close connection with my family, not being with them is this great sense of loss.

It’s a grief. I’m not trying to compare my grief to everyone else’s at any point today. So just hold onto that. But every time we drive away, there’s this ripping apart that, this tear that, that speaks of loss. So every time we leave. We put on music and we drive away as a family.

The people I love most are in the car with me, but the people I’ve known longest it’s another separation. And so this is a song about grief, but we’re just gonna pause in for a second. It speaks to what we feel.

Did you hear those lyrics? Like life goes on. I suppose that there’s a question mark in it for anyone who’s experienced grief. It’s that pause of time between what was and what you thought would be, and that’s how Lamentations reads if you read it like you would in the western world, a linear fashion.

But the end of Lamentations is not the core of Lamentations. The core of Lamentations is chapter three, the middle part. It’s a istic structure which points to the middle verses, and this is what the middle says. Watch how the writer in the midst of talking about all his experiences, how all of his experiences takes a shift.

It’s in verse 19. I remember my affliction and my wandering and the bitterness of the goal. I remember them and my shadow is down cast within me. Yet this I call to mine. Same verse Because of the Lord’s great love, we are not consumed for his compassion’s never fail. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness.

I say to myself, the Lord is my portion, therefore I will wait for him. The Lord is good To those whose hope is in him, to the ones who seek him, it is good. To wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. I called on your name, Lord, from the depths of the pit. You heard my plea. Do not close your ears to my cry for relief.

I came, you came near when I called you and you said, do not fear. Lamentations has this unique quality. It’s what I love about the book. It doesn’t deny our experience of this world that is often painful. And colored by suffering, and yet it asks that we hold hope alongside grief. Other texts would say, just lose grief, let it go, and then hope is the new story.

Lamentations is convinced that both of them live side by side. Lamentations is a chiasm. The central verses of the chiasm are hopeful. Kurt Thompson says this about hope. It’s a muscle that has to be exercised. Hope is a muscle current state that speaks to my belief about the future. We work to hold hope and tension with pain.

A couple of weeks ago, I was in conversation with a friend. His wife had been sick for over 10 years and was healed incredibly in a surprising turn of events, and yet what he found in the midst of that was that her body was still incredibly weak and had to be strengthened over multiple years. It was muscles work that had to be developed.

When we live in grief, hope feels weak, and yet it has to be strengthened for it to be held alongside that grief. Paul in Romans chapter five, verse three says this, not only but we also glory in our sufferings. It’s one of those times where I read Paul and say, really? And yet he insists that it’s possible to hold the two together.

What’s encouraging to us, I think about Lamentations chapter three, the middle central part of the chasm is this, the way the language reflects what Jesus did. In Isaiah 53, he feel the similarity of the language. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, familiar with pain, like no one from whom people for one from whom people hid their faces.

He was despised and we held him in lower esteem. Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God. Stricken by him afflicted, but he was pierced through our transgressions. I. He was crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought UST peace was on him, and by his wounds, we are healed.

When you think about the language used there, it’s the language that narrator uses about Lady Zion. It’s the language of pointing of like gossip, of like brokenness. And yet this is Jesus and his work for us, and by his wounds we are healed. The center of Lamentations reminds us to exercise hope in God’s faithfulness to us.