Reflection: Restore: Lamentations: Prayers and Poetry

Reflection Questions

        1. What has been the most recent season where mourning has silenced the joy in your life?

        2. Were you able to keep bitterness and fear from taking hold? How?

        3. Like Israel are you able to cling to God and turn to Him when evil appears to prevail?

Share: Psalm 30 says that the Lord has turned "my mourning into dancing." Do you believe the Lord will do this? have you experienced it yourself?

        

Restore: Lamentations: Prayers and Poetry

Reading: Lamentations 5:11-15: "...Elders are gone from the gate, Young men from their music. The joy of our hearts has ceased; Our dancing has been turned into mourning." 

Restore

Mourning--loss--fear--tears--each rip us apart. We replace love and hope with anger and dread and sometimes become determined to battle. Or sometimes to fade away into isolation internally and externally.

Grief cannot be mended. Yet only in the Lord can it be softened into sadness and memories. To remember and embrace without torment.

To cherish life day by day in all circumstances and become compassionate to others in heartbreak.

Lord, guide each of us to pray to hold onto You in grief and in joy, in mourning and in joy, in isolations and joy. Your light alone, by Your direction, will show us how to live into peace in all circumstances.

Your thoughts,

Survival: Lamentations: Prayers and Poetry

                Survival

                Under scorching

                heat of famine

                carry the sins

                of ancestors

                face wilderness

                threats daily

                to survive

                pact with slave lords

            

                to beg bread

                meager cups

                crawling with insects

                our daily survival

                at whim of servants

                bored with humanity

                derision their

                conversation.

Psalm 37:37: "Mark the blameless, and behold the upright, for their is posterity for the peaceable."

Reflection: Everywhere: Lamentations: Prayers and Poetry

Reflection Questions 

        1. In what ways do you think we might also carry the sins of our heritage?

        2. What unrelenting desert seasons have marked your life?

        3. How can we break the consequences from continuing on to the next generation? Or can we?

Share: How does the gift of salvation carry us through times of heart and soul famine?

Everywhere: Lamentations: Prayers and Poetry

Reading: Lamentations 5:6-10: ... "Slaves rule over us; There is no one to deliver us from their hand. We get our bread at the risk of our lives Because of the sword in the wilderness..".

Everywhere

At first it seems these circumstances are so different from our lives and yet in some ways they are still the same.

Around the world we too get caught up in forms of bondage due to conditions, like a pandemic, and authorities and rulers--some that compromise safety in their aim for power.

We speak our truths at risk of condemnation and can receive broken relationships.

Or we keep silent and find ourselves drifting away from the Lord.

The wilderness is still deep and wide and filled with dangers. Everywhere.

Soul danger. Truth danger. Cost danger. Without You, Lord, everything is nothing.

Please lead us to go where You go Lord. To see daily through Your light and be Your people wherever You guide. Your heart within us throughout all our actions and decisions.

Your thoughts, 

 

Cost: Lamentations: Prayers and Poetry

                Cost

                Her people pay now 

                to draw water from

                their own wells

                work in fields to

                earn day's wood

                twigs for night warmth.

                Once the owners

                now laborers on

                their own land.

                Given to aliens

                dressed in strange

                garments. Foreign voices

                command heritage.

Psalm 37:36:"Again I passed by, and they were no more; thought I saw them, they could not  be found."

Reflection: Errors: Lamentations: Prayers and Poetry

 Reflection Questions

        1. Have you had to relinquish your life as you knew it due to your own sin or another's?

        2. What all did it cost you?

        3. Do you think it's possible that such a devastation can become a blessing? Why or why not?

Share: How does the act of being remembered put us back together or restore us?