When things are not turning out fine, holding onto God does not mean pretending they are. Lamentations 3 shows another way, and it works in a particular order. First the poet says plainly how bitter his life has become. Then he deliberately calls something else to mind, and from that act he says he has hope. His circumstances do not change between those two moves. What changes is what he allows to speak last.
This guide follows that order slowly, with short practices for each day of a hard week. It draws on a Jude 3 Project conversation between Lisa Fields and Dr. Cynthia James, who serves on the pastoral staff of the Potter’s House and once taught psychology. They recorded it early in the coronavirus pandemic, while one of James’s sons was seriously ill. You can work through the guide alone in about ten minutes a day, or with two or three people you trust. Nothing here asks you to tell anyone more than you want to.
Read the poem before you reach for the comfort
Lamentations is poetry, and it is grief poetry. It mourns the destruction of Jerusalem and the suffering of its people. Its chapters are carefully built, and several follow the order of the Hebrew alphabet. That tells you something. This pain was not blurted out and then forgotten. Someone shaped it with care, and God’s people kept it as Scripture. Lament belongs inside the Bible’s own speech.
If you can, read Lamentations 3:1-24 aloud. Then read verses 19-24 again, slowly:
Remembering mine affliction and my misery, the wormwood and the gall. My soul hath them still in remembrance, and is humbled in me. This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope. It is of the LORD’S mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. The LORD is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in him.
A few words help. Wormwood and gall are bitter plants, used here as pictures of bitterness and poison. To be consumed is to be finished off, used up completely. A portion is a share, the part that belongs to you. The poet has lost nearly everything, and he names the LORD as the share no one can take.
Before going further, try three observations:
- Mark every word in verses 1-20 that describes what the poet feels or has lost. Notice how much room he gives it before verse 21 arrives.
- Find the word “therefore” in verses 21 and 24. What is each one resting on?
- Notice what is missing from verses 21-24. No one says the city has been rebuilt or the pain has stopped. What, then, is the hope about?
Why the bitterness comes first
Many of us learned, by instruction or by example, to skip straight to verse 22. Someone shares something terrible, and the room hurries to the mercies. The trouble is that a hope which requires you to deny your pain cannot bear much weight, because part of you knows the denial is false.
Dr. James drew that line clearly when Lisa Fields asked what she would say to believers feeling hopeless:
Hope is not just a positive outlook. It’s not just whistling a happy tune, as it were.
The cheerful version quietly puts you in charge of producing the right feelings. On a day you cannot produce them, you suffer twice: once from the trouble and again from the sense that you have failed at faith. Lamentations will not let you do that to yourself. It puts the wormwood on the page first.
Lisa Fields was candid about her own version of this. Speaking of not knowing when the crisis would end, she said, “It brings anxiety to my heart if I think about it too long.” She also named a common fear, that people think when they fear they’re in a space of a complete lack of faith. James answered that faith does not run along level ground with no highs or lows, and she offered an image: “The boat’s on the water is not sinking, but it sure can rock.”
Rocking tells you about the weather, not about whether you are going under. Verse 20 is a rocking boat. The poet’s soul still remembers and is bowed down inside him, and the same poet is one line away from saying he has hope. Both are true of him at once.
James also refused to treat every hard feeling as a spiritual defect. Of the anxiety people were carrying, she said, “It has a legitimate cause. It’s a justifiable anxiety.” Some of what you feel is simply the right response to something genuinely wrong.
What the poet calls to mind
Verse 21 is an act. The poet does not wait until he feels hopeful. He recalls something on purpose, and the hope follows from what he recalls. Look at its content: the LORD’s mercies, compassions that do not fail, faithfulness renewed each morning, the LORD himself as his portion. Every item is about who God is. None of it is a forecast about how next month will go.
That matches what James described. She said “hope is designed, I believe, in the midst of trouble.” It is built for the storm, not saved for after it. Elsewhere she said “we have that confidence that God will do what God said he would do,” while admitting that some promises are fulfilled “not always in our lifetime.” Her hope rests on a promise and on the One who made it, so it does not need a cheerful forecast to stay standing.
Be honest about what happens next in the text, though. The poem does not end at verse 24. The grief returns. Later in the chapter the poet describes weeping that will not stop until the LORD looks down from heaven. The book’s final chapter closes with a plea, asking whether God has utterly rejected his people. Calling hope to mind does not close the lament. It is spoken in the middle of it, and the lament keeps going.
That may be the most freeing detail in the chapter. If you call hope to mind today and the bitterness is back tomorrow, you have not lost your faith. You are where the poet was. The mercies are new every morning, perhaps partly because they are needed every morning. James’s own prayers that week sounded like this: “Lord, I don’t know. I don’t even know what to ask.” She called them “more confessional than ever.” A prayer that honest is still a prayer that remembers who is listening.
A week in the same order
Each day has the poem’s two movements, followed by one small act. Use paper you can keep private. If a day goes badly and you skip it, start again the next morning. The practice is not a test.
- Name it (morning, two minutes). Write your own version of verse 19 in one sentence: what is bitter today. Write the real version, not the one you would post. You do not have to resolve it or explain it.
- Call it to mind (two minutes). Read Lamentations 3:22-24. Underneath your first sentence, write one thing about God that would still be true however this turns out. If nothing comes, copy out verse 23 and leave it there.
- Take today’s portion (through the day). James quoted part of Matthew 6:34, which reads, “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” Name one thing that is genuinely yours to do today, and do it. When you notice yourself straining to fix what you cannot fix, borrow what James told herself during her son’s illness: “back down, Cynthia, back it down, bring it down a notch because I couldn’t fix anything at that moment.” Put your own name in it.
- Prepare the evening (five minutes). James planned ahead for the hours when worry tends to rise: “I know evening is coming, so what am I gonna do? I’m not gonna listen to every coronavirus report.” She chose light classical music because it settled her. Choose one input to turn off tonight and one thing that quiets you.
On harder days, add one of these. Take a walk, which James said she finds psychologically renewing. Do something for someone else, since she observed that “there is always something I think, healing and helpful about service and responsiveness and listening.” Or finish a single task, telling yourself, as she did, “okay, complete this. Be deliberate about it before you go to the next thing.”
At the end of the week, read your seven morning sentences and the seven truths beneath them. Do not grade them. Simply notice whether anything moved, and whether the second line ever held when the first one did not.
If the storm is bigger than a hard week
James was careful to say she is not a clinician, and this guide is pastoral care, not treatment. Some anxiety is a fitting response to real trouble. If sleep, appetite or dread do not improve, or you are struggling to get through ordinary days, please talk to a doctor or a licensed counselor. Jude 3 teaches that seeking therapy is not a failure of faith. God works through trained counselors and clinicians, and caring for your mind is part of stewarding the life God gave you. If your thoughts turn toward ending your life, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or contact local emergency services if you are in immediate danger. Lamentations gives you words for grief. It was never meant to replace the people God can use to help you carry it.
Walking through it together
If you use this with a group, protect the order of the poem in the room. When someone names something painful, let it land before anyone speaks. Do not answer a raw sentence with verse 22. The poet earned his “therefore” by first saying the whole truth, and people need the same room.
Make every kind of sharing optional, including the morning sentences. Agree together that what is said stays in the group. Some people will want to read their verse 19 aloud. Others will only say whether the week was heavier or lighter, and that is enough. If someone in the group is grieving a loss they could not mark in the usual way, you might help them, as James’s family had to, find another way to memorialize and to try to bring closure.
Questions for the middle of it
- The poet spends twenty verses on bitterness before verse 21. What happens in you when someone moves you to the comfort too quickly? What happens when you do that to yourself?
- Of the truths in verses 22-24, which is hardest for you to believe right now, and which comes most easily? Why might they differ?
- Have you ever been told, directly or indirectly, that low feelings meant weak faith? How did that shape the way you prayed afterward?
- What is the difference, for you, between being shaken and being lost? What would you count as evidence of one or the other?
- Lamentations ends still asking God a question. Does it help or trouble you that Scripture preserves an unresolved prayer?
- What is one thing in front of you this week that is yours to do, and one thing you are carrying that was never yours to carry?
Just after the verses this guide has followed, the poem says, “The LORD is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him. It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the LORD” (Lamentations 3:25-26). Waiting here is not the same as pretending. The poet waits with the wormwood still in his mouth. Tomorrow the bitterness may still be there, and so will the mercies. Name the one, and then call the other to mind.