Verse of the Day for October 13

Lamentations is a funeral song for a destroyed city, written by someone who watched it happen. It is five chapters of grief with almost no relief in it.

The exception sits in the middle of chapter three, and it is famous — his mercies are new every morning. What is less quoted is the line that follows a few verses later.

Quietly wait. Not passively, and not silently in the sense of having no feelings — this is a book of loud feelings. Quietly in the sense of without frantic motion.

The man writing this has every reason to be doing something. His city is rubble. And he has concluded, from inside the rubble, that hoping and quietly waiting is a good thing rather than a wasted thing.

That conclusion is worth more coming from him than it would be from someone comfortable.

There is a difference between quiet waiting and numb waiting. One is aimed at God. The other has simply stopped.

He wrote this in the ruins, which is the only place it could have been proved.