Till the Lord Look Down

To the mother in the back row

You got there early. You always do. You took the bench nearest the door so you could see him when the side door opens, and so you could step out fast if your face gave way. His eighth grade picture is still in your wallet. You have read the docket taped by the door three times. In that room they call him by a case number. You know his middle name and the scar on his chin.

I want to give you a verse nobody puts on a coffee mug.

Mine eye trickleth down, and ceaseth not, without any intermission, till the LORD look down, and behold from heaven. (Lamentations 3:49-50)

The man who wrote that was standing in a burned city. His book is built as an alphabet poem, each stanza opening with the next Hebrew letter, and in chapter three every letter gets three verses. Somebody took grief seriously enough to give it every letter they had. Now look at the word till. His crying has somewhere to go. These are tears with an address on them, and they will not stop until the One they are addressed to looks.

That is lament. Complaint aimed at God.

Here is what I think you do at night, and I say it because I know a version of it myself. You replay. The double shift you picked up. The friend you should have run off the porch. The evening you were too tired to ask where he was going. You go over it at 2 a.m. like a prosecutor building a case against yourself. Part of why the mind does that is fear in disguise: if it was your fault, then it was in your control, and control is easier to carry than standing helpless. Guilt can become a hiding place from grief.

If there are real wrongs in that pile, confess them once, to him, and let the blood of Christ do what replaying never will. Then close the file.

And there is the other thing. On Sunday you pray tidy prayers where people can hear. In the car you tell God what you really think, and then you apologize for it. The same poet who wrote verse 49 wrote a few lines earlier, “Thou hast covered thyself with a cloud, that our prayer should not pass through” (3:44). That sentence is in your Bible. God kept it there on purpose.

He kept this too. Crushing prisoners underfoot, turning aside a man’s right in court: “the Lord approveth not” (3:34-36). Whatever happens in that room today, heaven is not neutral about how people are handled in it. You may be the only person in the building praying for the judge and the prosecutor and your son, all by name.

The poet begged God to look down. God did more than look. He came down. He stood in a courtroom as the accused. His mother stood near the cross and watched, the sword an old man once promised her finally going through her soul. Jesus wept over the very city Lamentations mourns, and on the cross he prayed a lament out loud. He is not embarrassed by your tears. He has cried them. And the third day came, so your son is not finished.

Stop prosecuting yourself. Say how longand say it to him. Then stay in your seat. He is looking down.

Ronnie