Lamentations 3:32-33: Hope at Ground Level

Though he brings grief, he will show compassion, so great is his unfailing love. For he does not willingly bring affliction or grief to anyone.

Lamentations 3:32-33 (NIV)

Hope at Ground Level

Three volunteers in a greenhouse were arguing about water. One said the trays were too wet, one said too dry, and the third kept lifting a tray and setting it down, trying to feel the difference. Outside it was November and inside it smelled like warm dirt. Then they thinned the trays, pulling the smaller seedlings out so the ones that stayed would have room, and the argument ended because thinning is the one job in a greenhouse nobody argues about.

It makes a good picture for God and pain, and people use it that way. Whoever pulls the seedling knows why that one. The plant that stays gets the light.

Lamentations was written over a ruined city, and it will not hold that picture for long. The volunteer can point at the tray and tell you which seedling and how far apart. The poem says God brings grief and will show compassion, and then says he does not willingly bring affliction or grief to anyone, and it never tells you which grief, or whose, or what it was for.

Those two things don’t fit together neatly, and nobody in the poem tries to make them fit. God brings grief. God takes no willingness in himself to do it. Both of them said by a voice inside a wrecked city.

He never says which griefs. He never tells one particular person that what happened to them was aimed at them, and I won’t either. That is not mine to settle, in either direction.

The passage gives something narrower and steadier. Compassion is coming, and there is no appetite in God for the hurt. The love behind it is called unfailing, so it outlasts whatever is running now, and that is as far as the promise goes and as far as I will take it.

There may yet be hope is said to a man with his face in the dust. It arrives at ground level, before he stands up, before one thing about his week improves.