Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.
Lamentations 3:22-23 (NIV)
New Every Morning, Not January
Two minutes past midnight, the year is new and the kitchen is the same kitchen. The glass is in the sink where it was at eleven. The envelope that came Thursday is on the counter, and what it says inside hasn’t changed.
Nothing turns over at midnight except the number. A man by himself at that hour finds that out faster than a house full of people does, because there’s nobody in the hallway to perform the change for.
The man who wrote this line had already said his splendor was gone and everything he’d hoped from the Lord along with it. He was making poetry out of his affliction and his wandering, the bitterness and the gall. Sitting in that, he says: “Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”
He calls that to mind on purpose, on top of everything he’d just finished remembering, and says that’s where the hope comes from. The compassions he names arrive every morning rather than every January, so the next one comes with the next morning, and the one after it with the morning after that.
It’s a shorter promise than the ones people make at this hour, and a steadier one. I can take this line as far as tomorrow morning, and that’s where I stop with it. It doesn’t scale with the calendar either. A year doesn’t get more of God’s compassion than a Wednesday does, and the man who wrote this was going to need his portion on every ordinary day that came after.
A clock does the same thing tonight at midnight that it’ll do tomorrow night at midnight, with far fewer people watching. The promise he was given was about the morning after both of them.
A Prayer to Remember
It’s a long way to morning and I’ve been doing arithmetic on this year instead of sleeping. Get me to daylight, Lord. Have something there when I get there, the way you’ve had it there for people in worse shape than I’m in. If all I get tomorrow is enough for tomorrow, let that be enough.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
