Devastating and Temporary

- Changes with Ben's treatment

- Come and go as you please, Kids coming home from school changing clothes and showering.

- Before you get sick, no big deal, now you are quarentined in your room.

- Before, you did normal cleaning, now you cleaned every room with disinfectant a week. - Before, you went to the doctor once a year for a check up, now you are the nurse - checking blood pressure multiple times a day, changing IV bags, dispensing medicine at the correct doses, changing dressings, and cleaning port sites.

- Before, I would go into the office to do my work, now I did my work from a Hospital room on my laptop or my work was fighting with insurance companies to pay medical bills.

- Before I would sleep in my own bed, now I slept half the time on a couch in a Hospital room 1/8th shorter than me.

- Before, I would work out in my living room, now I try to sneak in a quick 15 min. workout before the nurses see me - Just to generate some energy.

This passage is all about Contrasting Before’s and Afters.

Summary from Chapter 4

Grieving is a non-linear, personalized process of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Biblical Lament is a unique Christian way of grieving where we turn to the Lord, name our grief, ask God for Help, Remember God’s Love, and Trust God.

Chapter 3 is the Apex of the Book of Lamentations. It is the Main Point of the Book, and as Such is the only Chapter that has a significant amount of hope.

Chiastic Structure: Chapter 1 Intro: Prayer of Grief and Shame parallels Chapter 5: Prayer for God’s Mercy, Chapter 2: The Fall of Jerusalem & God’s Wrath parallels Chapter 4: The effects of the Seige of Jerusalem, Chapter 3 the Apex point of the book.

So important to read Chapter 4 in light of Chapter 3, otherwise we see no hope, or we get stuck in grief and bitterness and don’t move towards gratitude and love. Nonetheless Chapter 4 is important in Naming the Devestation....

What does that Devastation look like?

Devastation is painful.

The Lamentor in Chapter 4 deals with some intense pain.

He Contrasts what it is like for different people groups before the seige and by the end of the seige.

Mothers who are loving and care for their children, now can not feed them, and they beg on the street, and worse cannibalism.

The Wealthy once at fine food and wore high end clothing, no lay on trash heaps and are ruined on the streets.

The Ruler’s appearance was the picture of healthy, now their skin clings to their bones, they are sun burned

The Prophets and Priests are now walking blindly on the streets and are considered the people who are defiled.

Pictures of Before and After

Before the California Fire, After the California Fire.

Bahamas before the Hurricane, Bahamas after the Hurricane.

Before the Tornado, After the Torado.

One thing might go through our mind.

1. Now I feel guilty, because my suffering is not that great... Comparative Suffering...

...without thinking, we start to rank our suffering and use it to deny or give ourselves permission to feel … But this is not how emotion or affect works. Emotions do not go away because we send them a message that these feelings are inappropriate and do not score high enough on the suffering board. ... The entire myth of comparison suffering is the belief that empathy is finite…False. When we practice empathy with ourselves and others, we create more empathy. - Brene’ Brown

Possibly then, when we lament well over “lesser” sufferings, we grow in our capacity to Lament with and for ourselves in “greater” sufferings, so Lament whether great or small is important to help us grow as disciples of Jesus. Both to strengthen our resilience in suffering, but also to increase our empathy with other people’s suffering.

Video of Contrasts during COVID-19.

Two things this passage does that is also helpful for us in Grieving. 1. Name the Contrast, and 2. Remind yourself that...

Devastation is Temporary.

Yes, You have to look closely, but check out verse 22...

I want to encourage you with a couple of things especially for Young People and those who struggle with seeing the goodness of God in this passage.

This passage is indeed of a devastation that is unbearable. How could God do this? First, I want to remind you that God’s wrath is a lifting of his protective power, and allowing the effects of Israel’s turning from God to play out in its natural consequences. This means Babylon is given unhindered access to do what Babylon wants to do with Israel without God protecting Israel. We read in Daniel that God was angry at the cruelty with which Babylon treated Israel, and for that Cruelty, God allowed the Persian Empire to Destroy the Babylonian empire.

As such this lifting of God’s protective power was by design temporary.

Verse 22 says that there was a completion to the Devastation, and End. We hear these words from Jesus’ mouth when he is on the Cross. “It is Finished.”

Targum seeing the Messiah as the fulfillment of 4:22

The Rabbinic Messiah Lamentations 4:22

After that your sins shall be expiated, O congregation of Zion, and you shall be delivered by the hands of the King Messiah and of Elijah the High Priest, and the Lord will no longer keep you in the Dispersion. At the very same time He will visit upon you your iniquities, O wicked Rome, built up in Italy, and full of armies of the enslaved, Persians shall come and oppress you and capture you for you are exposed before the Lord for your quilt.

Without this Perspective, and the perspective of the Gospel, and frankly Chapter 3 of Lamentations, all of the dwelling on Contrast of Before and After would cause us to spiral downward into a pit of bitterness.

The Reminder of the Good News, that God’s Love never ends, that these periods of Devastation are Temporary actually free us to both name our grief well, and do that in Hope. - “We do not grieve as those who have no hope.”

It allows us to live in a temporary normal.

On “New Normal.” - I have heard this phrase used a lot. It is both a helpful and non-helpful phrase.

We talked about a New Normal for our family during the 9 months of Ben’s BMT recovery. It was helpful, because it spoke to the reality, that our routines, our way of life, the way we looked at the world, the things we never thought we would learn, the fighting with insurance companies was so different than before. At the end of 9 months we had a New, New Normal we had to deal with, which was re-instating some pre-Transplant routines while also at the same time completely being changed by the experience. That experience by the way prepared us for what Quarentine during COVID-19 is like. There are some similarities for our family.

At the same time it is un-helpful, because there is a sense that nothing is normal about what we are experiencing, and we don’t want it to be normal, and we recognize it is not normal because it is temporary. And so it glances over that things are not the way they should be.

I want this to sink in a little bit, What we called “Normal” before COVID-19 was also not normal under that definition. The world was not as it was meant to be before either, we were just more comfortable with it. When Devastation happens it highlights it for us. Before we found our coping routines for life as God had not designed it, and now during we have to find new coping routines.

All of it is Temporary

And this is the primary reason for the book of Lamentations - Is that in our Laments, we realize, that we need a savior. We need someone to make things return to how they are supposed to be.

We need Jesus, who will put an end to sin, who will put an end to suffering, and pain, and death, and restore our lives and the way the world is to be.

To be Kingdom People is to live like Jesus in this time in history when things are not as they should fully be, and to hope for the time when Jesus will restore all things.

Conclusion:

Name those things that have changed. Lament them to the Lord,

And Realize that it is Jesus who ultimately empathizes with you and empowers you to live through it.

And remind yourself that this too shall pass, and it is in Jesus suffering ends and restoration begins.