Lamentations is the bleak account of the aftermath of a lost war. The voices of the survivors invite us into the horror of their world with raw testimony and unbridled grief. They give us details we’d probably rather not hear and confront us with a despair few of us can handle.
It's only natural that we seek to latch on to anything positive or comforting within its five poems. However, God never speaks and hope is almost non-existent.
We’ve traditionally made the praise that’s found a third of the way through Lamentations 3, the focal point of the book. But by doing this, we’ve robbed these poems of their beautiful tragedy and drawn conclusions that are unhelpful to survivors.
Could it be that Lamentations is suggesting that we do something else other than praise as we suffer?
