Because of the Lord ’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions 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 one who seeks him; it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord . It is good for a man to bear the yoke while he is young. Let him sit alone in silence, for the Lord has laid it on him. Let him bury his face in the dust – there may yet be hope. Let him offer his cheek to one who would strike him, and let him be filled with disgrace. For no-one is cast off by the Lord for ever. Though he brings grief, he will show compassion, so great is his unfailing love. For he does not willingly bring affliction or grief to anyone.
Lamentations 3:22-33 NIVUK
We've been on a few trips with my wife's family. They are always so full of energy and excitement and humour that every trip is a delight. But there is one that sticks out more than most.
We were headed to the north of Leyte, and eventually to southern Samar, to stay in a hotel for a few days and then see an off the beaten track tourist attraction. It was a year after Typhoon Haiyan had caused havoc in the island and we were so grateful to be together. We were tearing up the miles in a couple of vehicles. My nieces and nephews were bang on form - utterly hilarious. But suddenly the laughter stopped. The whole van fell utterly silent. Unforgettably silent.
We were passing the hotel that we had wanted to book for that night. It was a really nice place, built to western standards and with beautiful rooms.
Now all that remained was one wall. Just one single wall. The typhoon had smashed a strong, concrete, multi-storey hotel and reduced it to rubble.
Our family had lived through the typhoon. They had felt its power. There were people living not far from them who had lost everything. Some were still living in homes with no roof a year later. Their elementary school had been damaged and was still not repaired.
But Tacloban in particular had taken a severe hit. Thousands had died. That hotel and the remnants of a ship which had been tossed ashore into a poor neighbourhood were strong reminders of a truly sobering reality.
This city had experienced a deep tragedy.
Many thinkers and philosophers and theologians have tried for centuries to form a framework to help us process and understand suffering and disaster. Men with more letters after their name than they have letters in their name - much greater than me - have tried. But we are still where we are. We still have millions traumatised by suffering around the globe.
Why is this?
Because any framework for understanding suffering matters little if it isn't practical. It has to work in the real world. And the problem with many of our frameworks is that they don't. They are drawn up by highly intelligent men and women in ivory intellectual towers, far from the gritty reality of day-to-day life. They can't work because they were not designed to work. They are purely theoretical constructs. They are not practical.
Here the prophet Jeremiah gives us his framework for processing and understanding suffering. Jeremiah was likely an old man when he wrote these words. But there is no way that these words are only theoretical. Jeremiah had faced death threats (Jeremiah 38:4), restriction of liberty (Jeremiah 38:13, 28), and the whole book of Lamentations is his emotional record of the horrors of Jerusalem's fall to the Babylonians, the destruction of the Temple and the exile.
So anything he says about suffering needs to be taken seriously, since he literally wrote a book on it, two books in fact, and lived every word.
And believe me, his framework works.
It works for the victim of a seemingly senseless natural disaster or crime. It works for the patient, brought low by a merciless disease or condition. It works for the bereaved soul, standing at the graveside and longing to scream inside because they just can't work out why it had to happen. It works for the child abandoned in an orphanage, for the elderly person abandoned in a hospice, for the young person striking it out on their own for the first time and feeling the bitter sting of loneliness. It works for the person struck down by regret, by guilt, by despair. It works for the person who struggles to forgive others or themselves and who is crippled by regret.
It works for all of us. Because all of us, at some point, will suffer. Jeremiah is giving us our means of survival, no matter the odds.
Friends, these verses are critically important. We must read them, learn them and apply them. They are to us what insulin is to a diabetic or an epinephrine pen is to a person with allergies or a pacemaker is to a person with a weak heart.
They are our life. Our survival depends on them.
Within these verses, we see three critical aspects of what God does for us when we suffer.
The first of these is that HE IS OUR PROVISION.
You are now studying something that is so real to my heart. Jesus is our strength and stay.