Lamentations 3: 26-30
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.
All the lights were out in my house, except for the lights on the Christmas tree. It appeared in my sight similar to this picture, because my teary eyes could only see blurs when I looked up at the tree.
I was sitting on the floor, quietly crying on Christmas Eve. My wife was in bed asleep; she and I were four years into our infertility saga. I wondered, "Why, Lord? We want to be parents so badly. There are people who don't want to be parents who produce a child. Why can't we? Do you not want us to have children?"
Sure, it seems a bit silly now, decades down the line, with two natural born sons and an adopted daughter all grown up into adults. But in the silence of that moment, sitting alone and burying my face, my dominant feeling was despair.
Yet, of course, there was hope. Hope in the Lord. Hope in an answer. Hope in a miracle.
Jeremiah felt the same way, sitting amidst the rubble of fallen Jerusalem. As I continue my pre-Advent series on Lamentations 3: 19-36, we come to the part where Jeremiah sees God's promises in the midst of waiting. Jeremiah doesn't pretend that it is easy to wait; yet he assures us that the Lord's rescue is coming, and in the meantime, we must endure suffering.
Today's full text is:
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.
Ready to sign up for silence, burying your face in the dust, allowing yourself to be struck down and held down, becoming even an object of ridicule and disgrace?
Things happen in the Lord's time. We wait for an answer. The answer may not be what we want. If God's final answer to our household would have been, "No, you can't have natural born children," then we likely would have adopted more than one. And that would have been OK. God would have been joyful and present in the midst of our adoptive parenting of multiple children.
Today, know and experience God's goodness that will produce an answer, will grant the Lord's view of a rescue, will lift us further toward our salvation and our eternal time with Him. Wait quietly. Suffer. Hope. That is Jeremiah's prescription while waiting for promises to be fulfilled.
Jeremiah and his fellow Jerusalem residents were in the midst of a crisis. As you face a crisis, a great resource is my book, The Next Thing: A Christian Model for Dealing with Crisis in Personal Life. Lives are being impacted by this book, so please check it out before your next crisis.