Read Lamentations 1 here.

In a world that gets faster every day, where we meet in person less and less frequently, we can’t help but realize the quality of conversations and relationships have begun to suffer at the hands of our obsession with speed and convenience.  The word “friend” has been reduced to any person you encounter, digitally or otherwise.  The word “love” has been reduced to something we say about anything from cheese to our spouse.  Relationships have likewise been reduced to a series of relatively short-lived, predictable conversations, where little to nothing real is ever shared.

If you listened in on some of these empty conversations, you might come to believe that no one is suffering or experiencing setbacks, because “it’s all good.”  We are willing in these relationships to keep things positive even at the expense of overlooking the hard times we are experiencing.  The truth is that all of us are struggling in some way or another, and all of us are looking for answers.  The world tells us that keeping the hard times to ourselves is usually the best option. The God of the Bible takes a different approach to our suffering.  God not only knows that we suffer, but he understands that getting grief and pain out of our system is integral in moving toward resolution.

In times of trouble a true friend will not just give you any advice, but will simply sit with you and listen.  In these moments, when the thoughts of our hearts are out in the open, we can view them in the same way a detective lays evidence out and begins to connect the dots.  God has the human heart down to a science. He knows that only after we confront the realities of our distress can we speak our minds, whether in frustration, anger, confusion or pain, in order to find the connections, and finally find a way out.