New Every Morning

It helps to know how carefully Lamentations is built. The book is five separate poems, and four of them are acrostics: the verses march through the Hebrew alphabet from aleph to taw, the equivalent of A to Z. That is a strange thing to do while you are drowning in grief. The poet has lost almost everything, yet he writes in the most disciplined form his language offered. I read that as a very human instinct. When the world has come apart, sometimes the only way to keep moving is to hold to a structure, to say the whole alphabet of your pain in order rather than let it dissolve into a formless cry.

The third poem, where our two verses sit, is the tightest acrostic of the five. It runs three lines per letter, sixty-six verses in all, and it stands at the very centre of the book. That placement matters. The hope is not tacked onto the end, where it might feel cheap or tidy. It is set down in the middle of the rubble, at the point where the grief is heaviest. The shape itself is doing some of the preaching.

Two Hebrew words carry most of the weight in these lines, and both are worth slowing down for. The first, rendered here as ‘loving kindnesses’, is chesed. It is one of the great words of the Old Testament, and English keeps reaching for it and falling short. It means loyal, covenant love: the settled commitment of someone who has bound themselves to you and refuses to let go. It is the love that keeps a promise long after the feelings would have packed up and left.

The second word, ‘mercies’, is rachamim, and it is quietly tender. It shares a root with the Hebrew word for a womb. So the picture underneath ‘his mercies’ is close to a mother’s gut-deep compassion for the child she has carried. That is the God the poet is describing over the ashes of his city. Not a remote administrator of justice, but One whose compassion is as instinctive and bodily as a mother’s love. I keep returning to that. The same God who let the consequences fall is the God whose mercy is named in the most intimate term the language had.

The morning is not just scenery in these verses. The reflection already points to the manna in the wilderness, the bread that came fresh each dawn and would not keep overnight, so I will not labour that. What strikes me is how far this morning pattern runs through the rest of Scripture.

Psalm 30:5, one of the cross-references here, sets weeping in the night and joy in the morning. The Gospels are careful to place the resurrection early on the first day of the week, at dawn, in a garden. The faithfulness Lamentations clings to over a burned-out Jerusalem turns out to be the same faithfulness that did not abandon Jesus to the grave. Hebrews 13:8, another of the references listed, makes the point plainly about Christ being the same yesterday, today and for ever. The poet could not have seen how far his words would carry. He simply trusted that God’s character would outlast his city. It did, and it outlasts death as well.

I want to be honest about how this verse works in a real life, because it is not a feeling. The poet never claims he woke up flooded with peace. A line earlier he makes a deliberate choice to remember, against the grain of everything in front of him. Grief and tiredness are loud, and the story they tell feels total. He answers them by calling a truer thing to mind on purpose.

Mornings, I find, are honest. The worry you took to bed is usually still sitting at the foot of it. What steadies me is not pretending the ruin has gone, because often it has not, but taking the verse at its word: the mercy I need for this one day has not been used up. I do not have to scrape together enough grace to cover the whole road ahead. I only need enough for the next few hours, and that much is already here. Yesterday’s strength was for yesterday. There is fresh bread on the table for today.

• What is the first story your grief or worry tells you when you wake, and what truer thing could you deliberately set against it?
• Where are you trying to make yesterday’s grace stretch to cover a day it was never given for?
• The poet said ‘great is your faithfulness’ while his city still lay in ruins. Is there a place where you could say something like that before anything has been fixed?
• If God’s mercy for you really is as instinctive as a mother’s compassion, where have you quietly been picturing him as colder than he is?

If one of these has found you this morning, you might sit a while longer with the rest of Lamentations, or follow the thread of comfort and hope through more verses arranged by how you feel.