HOW CAN I HANDLE MY PAIN?

By Dorman Followwill

I want to begin with a story about a Friday night in my life twelve years ago, when I was a sophomore in college. I was a Christian, and I had heard stirring truth when I was growing up from my favorite preacher, Major Ian Thomas. However, by the time I got to college I was carrying a warped view of God and myself. I envisioned my life as a pie chart made up of various slices. It included a sizable slice called "academics," because making good grades was where my self-worth came from. There was a "women" slice, a "friends" slice, and then a smaller "family" slice. And there was an extremely narrow slice entitled "God." What I liked about this pie-chart view of my life was that I felt I was totally in control of all the slices: I could manipulate their sizes based on my needs at any moment.

But on that Friday night in January 1983, I crossed over an invisible line. I went somewhere that night with a small group of friends who had no relationship with God. We began to open some doors to the spiritual realms that are far better left closed. Before those doors had opened very far, there was a long pause caused by an unexpected interruption. During this lull, I distinctly remember a very strong thought occurring to me: "You should not be here. Leave now." As the pause continued, I was faced with a profound choice: Should I leave and obey what I knew to be right from God's view, or should I stay and do what I wanted to do with my friends? As that fateful pause continued, I chose---to stay, and thus to disobey. We can choose our sin, but we cannot choose the consequences. That night unleashed months of hell in my life, the likes of which I would not wish to fall on anyone. I had thought I was in control of my life, but I was not. That night I foolishly stepped into the enemy's camp, and I ended up devastated. I went from the myth of the pie chart to the reality of how fragile I was apart from God. The first time we see that reality is a paralyzing moment of fearful truth.

I know a Christian woman who grew up near here. She was the youngest girl in a large family who was actively involved in her church, often singing solos at church functions. She answered an altar call to know Jesus Christ at the age of four. But her family life was pure chaos. Her father had abandoned her family when she was only three years old, and her mother gradually became incapacitated by her own grief and the overwhelming responsibility of raising many children on her own. Her mother would often rock for hours in her living room, weeping over her open Bible. In the midst of this chaos, this little girl was sexually abused by three different men. But while this was going on behind the scenes, she kept singing her signature song, I Was Born to Serve the Lord. By the time she reached adolescence, she had shut down emotionally. She sang no more. How could she handle such pain and violation? Did that open Bible have anything to say to her mother through her tears as she rocked absently in the living room?

Everyone knows such stories. You know your own story. The question each of us has to face in our life at some point is, How can I handle my pain? That there will be pain in this life is a given. How we interact with our pain is in our own hands. Today we will be talking about the biblical guide for processing personal pain and horror as presented in Lamentations.

Background of Lamentations: What was Jeremiah lamenting?

In our Bibles there is no introduction to this lament. The text simply begins by depicting a woman in dejection. This makes it difficult to understand what is happening. But in the Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Septuagint, an introductory note is provided: "And it came to pass, after Israel was taken captive, and Jerusalem made desolate, that Jeremiah sat weeping, and lamented with this lamentation over Jerusalem, and said...." Jeremiah is weeping over Jerusalem's fall in 587 BC.

Jeremiah's weeping over a fallen city is a bit difficult to grasp for people like us who live in American suburbia in the twentieth century. Our houses are relatively far apart, and large fences blockade us from one another. Our community relationships barely go beyond a neighbor's rare wave. But when I was in the Old City in Jerusalem some months ago, my eyes were opened to how tightly woven a community exists in that city. The streets are extremely narrow, houses are built with common walls, people are milling around everywhere, and there are a thousand conversations just waiting to happen. They experience a level of community far beyond what we encounter here in America. So I imagine Jeremiah wandering through empty streets, gazing at the heaps of ash, then stopping to finger a bit of it and saying, "This was Jacob's house. He and Rachel had four children, three girls and one boy. I can hear their children's laughter echoing in my mind. None of them lived." He might then move across the street and sift another pile of soot, saying, "Here lived Naomi with her blind mother. I brought them bread every day, until there was no more...." Down the road he would go, grieving at every ash heap.

Yet Jeremiah's weeping in the blackened hellhole that was Jerusalem was far from random. It took on a remarkably beautiful form. We will do three things in this study: listen to the content of Jeremiah's lament, briefly look at its beautiful form, and consider how we can handle our own pain.

Remembering suffering from a distance, then closing in on it, Lamentations 1, 2

In the first six verses Jeremiah laments the Jerusalem that was and is no more, bemoaning the profound sense of loss he is experiencing. She was formerly a princess, but now she is a slave! Even though she weeps, there is none to comfort her. All her majesty has departed from the daughter of Zion.

The key verse in chapter 1 is verse 7:

In the days of her affliction and homelessness Jerusalem remembers all her precious things that were from the days of old....

It fascinates me that Jeremiah says not that he remembers, but that Lady Jerusalem remembers. Jeremiah instructs us wisely here: The best way to begin a process of grieving is to objectify your own grief, putting yourself in a position to reflect on it in an impersonal way. Later you can gradually work inward to face the depth of your pain in an up-close, more personal way.

In verses 12-19 Lady Jerusalem wails for herself, crying out to any onlooker to consider her destitution. She begins in verse 12 by saying,

Is it nothing to all you who pass this way? Look and see if there is any pain [sorrow] like my [sorrow] which was severely dealt out to me, which the LORD inflicted on the day of His fierce anger.

This is a powerful statement on the uniqueness of her sorrow. The suffering of each one of us is unique, and must be accorded the dignity of being considered individually. One of the surest ways to marginalize someone's suffering is to lump it into a common category, or to quickly compare it to something you yourself have experienced with the oft-heard words, "I know just how you're feeling...when I went through such-and-such, I felt the same way...." But countering this trend toward oversimplification and the quickie classification of sorrow, Jerusalem wails out the uniqueness of the depth of her own pain.

Her pathos reaches its height in verse 16:

For these things I weep; My eyes run down with water; Because far from me is a comforter, One who restores my soul....

But she concludes wisely in verse 18,

The LORD is righteous; For I have rebelled against His command; Hear now, all peoples, And behold my [sorrow]; My virgins and my young men have gone into captivity.

Here she rightly ascertains that God has been a righteous judge in the process, and she assumes personal responsibility for her own rebellion. This important conclusion propels her into prayer in verses 20-22, beginning with the call,

See, O LORD, for I am in distress; My spirit is greatly troubled; My heart is overturned within me, for I have been very rebellious.

In chapter 2 the second dirge is recorded. The theme of this dirge is the fierce anger of the Lord. Similarly to chapter 1, it begins with a contrast between the glory that was over Zion, in the form of the cloud of the Lord's glory over the temple, and the cloud that is now over Zion---the cloud of his anger! In verses 2 and 3 the Lord is seen as swallowing up the inhabitants of Jacob, his flaming fire consuming them. In verses 4-9 we find that the Lord has become like an enemy; he has rejected his temple, and he has determined to destroy the gates and walls of Jerusalem.

In the midst of these objective descriptions of the Lord's anger poured out on Jerusalem, Jeremiah himself breaks into the lament with his own voice in verse 11:

My eyes fail because of tears, my spirit is greatly troubled; My heart is poured out on the earth, Because of the destruction of the daughter of my people, When little ones and infants faint In the streets of the city.

Continuing to speak with his own voice in verse 13, Jeremiah expresses his passion to comfort his people. But in all his passion, our weeping prophet is at a loss for words of comfort. He says,

How shall I admonish you? To what shall I compare you, O daughter of Jerusalem? To what shall I liken you as I comfort you, O virgin daughter of Zion? For our ruin is as vast as the sea; Who can heal you?

He weeps with great grief in verse 11, and he asks difficult questions in verse 13, questions seeking comfort but finding no quick answers. Both are integral to the grieving process.

Jeremiah wants to speak a word of comfort, but all he can say is a word reminding them of their own sin and its terrible consequences. Enemies come and hiss at the daughter of Jerusalem in verses 15 and 16. The chapter ends with the stirring prayer of Lady Jerusalem in verses 20-22. As this prayer opens in verse 20, she asks a heart-rending question:

...Should women eat their offspring,
The little ones who were born healthy?

How awful---she prays to ask how God could allow things to get so bad in Jerusalem during the siege that women resorted to cannibalism. In verses 21 and 22 she wails:

On the ground in the streets lie young and old, my virgins and my young men have fallen by the sword. Thou hast slain them in the day of Thine anger, thou hast slaughtered, not sparing...In the day of the LORD'S anger. Those whom I bore and reared, my enemy annihilated them.

There is a crescendo of grief here. It will reach its peak in chapter 3.

Finding the compassionate Lord of loyal love: He is good, Lamentations 3

As we enter chapter 3, we immediately sense a change. There is no more poetic talk of Jerusalem in the third person, nor is there any longer an objective, distant description of the Jerusalem that was and a lament over the Jerusalem that now is. No, at this stage, Jeremiah very personally and subjectively explores the depth of his own grief. This change is apparent in verses 1 and 2:

I am the man who has seen affliction because of the rod of His wrath. He has driven me and made me walk in darkness and not in light.

We read in verses 5-7,

He has besieged and encompassed me with bitterness and hardship. In dark places He has made me dwell, like those who have long been dead. He has walled me in so that I cannot go out; He has made my chain heavy.

Jeremiah plumbs the depth of his own grief until he reaches bottom in verse 18, a darkness having not even a glimmer of the light of hope:

So I say, "My strength has perished,
And so has my hope from the LORD."

He has reached his end. He finds himself hopeless in the deep night of pain.

But at this darkest point in the lament, the light suddenly bursts through in 3:19-39. It is at this bottoming-out point that Jeremiah finds his Lord, the Lord who meets us face-to-face in the valley of deep darkness as David affirms in Palm 23, when the "He" out there in Psalm 23:1-3 becomes the "You" right here in Psalm 23:4, 5 (see Discovery Paper 7120). Lamentations 3:19-25 is the heart of this book, the central focus:

Remember my affliction and my wandering, the wormwood and bitterness. Surely my soul remembers and is bowed down within me. This I recall to my mind, therefore I have hope.

The LORD'S loving kindnesses [loyal loves] indeed never cease, for His compassions never fail. They are new every morning; Great is Thy faithfulness. "The LORD is my portion," says my soul, "Therefore I have hope in Him." The LORD is good to those who wait for Him, to the person who seeks Him.

Thus Jeremiah finds God himself as the loyal lover, the covenant-keeping Lord whose compassions never fail, even in the darkest cave of pain. Instead of a never-ending night of suffering, there is the hope of continual new dawnings: His compassions are new every morning. Note the plurals here: loyal loves, compassions...far too many to be put in the singular! Jeremiah discovers how great is his Lord's faithfulness when he needs his faithfulness the most. At this point he concludes, "The LORD is my portion...." which means that he is Jeremiah's sufficiency. Put in another way, which also recalls Psalm 23, at the bottom of his own grief Jeremiah found that for him, "The LORD is my shepherd, and He is enough!" Based on this discovery, Jeremiah concludes two things. Verse 24: "...Therefore I have hope in Him." In his own hopelessness he discovers eternal hope in him who is enough for us. And verse 25: "The LORD is good to those who wait for Him, to the person who seeks Him." He has reached a critical point: Through all his wranglings and writhings, he has found that nonetheless the Lord is good, even in the direst of circumstances. The Lord alone is sufficient when all else fails, because his compassions fail not.

The key here is that Jeremiah finds his Lord in a profoundly personal way at the deepest depth of his suffering. The woman I spoke of at the beginning reached her spiritual depth of despair in her late thirties. She had grown to adulthood still attending church, but she had remained emotionally shut down. She had gotten married and was the mother of two children. She had attended PBC for some fifteen years at that point. But the total chaos in her own home life had brought her to a point of deep depression and darkness.

At the very bottom of the pit, she found herself sitting alone one afternoon in her living room, just as her mother had sat grieving in her own living room a generation before. She sat crying out to God, "Why am I the way I am? Why can't I move forward with you?" As she closed her eyes, she groaned to the Lord, "Please meet me, Lord. I can't go any farther." Then slowly the Lord did meet her in a quiet but probing way. As she sat in that living room, the Lord gently took her back through her life, starting from age three when her father had been hauled off to jail, right up to that present moment. As her memories flashed before her mind's eye, she felt the Lord probing her with questions, saying, "What was happening to you at this time?" and, "Do you remember this?" As this review of her life was ending, the Lord then put before her the age-old question of John 5:6: "Do you want to be well?" She pondered that question for a few moments. Then she sensed the Lord asking her to give him her grief. There in that living room, at the bottom of the pit of her pain, she had a profound encounter with Jesus Christ as she gave him her pain. Her experience mirrors Jeremiah's in Lamentations 3.

Dr. Larry Crabb, probably the most outstanding Christian counselor of our era, writes about a similar phenomenon in his book entitled Finding God. He concludes very astutely that "the road to finding God takes us through darkness before it brings us to light." Certainly Lamentations bears eloquent testimony to that truth. But I also loved the following story he shared about an elderly retired pastor:

He put his hands on my shoulders, looked up at me with an intense, gentle stare, and said, "I am eighty-seven years old. I lost my wife four years ago. I have never known such pain. I have begged God to take it away, to give me a sense of his presence that would ease this terrible loneliness I feel. He has not done so. But he has given me a taste of his goodness. I have a glimpse of what he has in store for me. And I am content till I go home." I cannot imagine the anguish in that man's soul as he sits alone at the breakfast table. He still hurts, but he is moving through his problems toward finding God. And God has revealed himself to him: he continues to live with meaning and joy in the midst of pain.

In Lamentations 3:26-39 Jeremiah continues to extol the greatness of God's compassion, explaining in verse 32,

"For if He causes grief, then He will have compassion according to His abundant loving kindness [loyal love]."

In this Jeremiah identifies a golden principle for the believer: Grief is always the precursor of compassion just as night precedes the dawn. When the Lord brings grief, we can begin to look expectantly for how his compassion will soon follow to cover over the grief with his loyal love. Thus grief is not our enemy, but the calling card of a faithful Friend.

Jeremiah concludes this section on finding God in the darkness with three great questions in verses 37-39. In verse 37 Jeremiah proclaims the utter trustworthiness of the Lord's word by asking the rhetorical question,

Who is there who speaks and it comes to pass, unless the LORD has commanded it?

Through this question, the sovereignty of God, even over catastrophic events, is underscored. In verse 38, Jeremiah asks,

Is it not from the mouth of the Most High
That both good and ill go forth?

In other words, Jeremiah affirms that these terrible calamities had to be allowed by God before they could come to pass, that he had reasons in his sovereignty for allowing them. The reason in this case is clearly presented both in the book of Jeremiah and here in Lamentations 1:8, 18: Jerusalem and Judah had sinned, and as a just consequence for this sin God had allowed Babylon to rise up and crush them. Thus the people had no real basis for claiming to be helpless victims of calamity; they had brought it on themselves. To underscore this point, Jeremiah asks his final question in verse 39:

Why should any living mortal, or any man,
Offer complaint in view of his sins?

From these powerful conclusions in verses 37-39, Jeremiah responds personally and passionately in verses 40-66. First, he calls the people to begin viewing themselves rightly in light of their relationship with their Lord of loyal love. In Lamentations 3:40 he calls them to corporate confession:

Let us examine and probe our ways,
And let us return to the LORD.

Second, after Jeremiah weeps again because of the ravaging effects of sin, he calls upon the Lord to bring the justice he feels is due to him personally in verses 59-66, as a counterbalance to the personal suffering he expressed earlier in verses 1-18.

Remembering one's suffering with the Lord, and leaving it, Lamentations 4,5

Having encountered his Lord in a very personal way in chapter 3, Jeremiah can process through his grief one more time, this time in intimate communication with his Lord. In chapter 4, Jeremiah sings another dirge about the distresses of the siege of the city, which is very reminiscent in theme to the issues he lamented in chapter 2. He describes in great detail the terrible hunger accompanying the siege in verses 3, 4, 5, and 9, and he even returns to the horrific picture of cannibalism in verse 10.

Jeremiah rehearses a litany of evils in this chapter, but he makes a startling discovery in the middle and at the end of the chapter. In verse 11 he realizes from the Lord that

The LORD has accomplished His wrath,
He has poured out His fierce anger....

This is a hint that the anger has been spent, and that he can begin turning from his lament to assume a posture of hope. Indeed, by verse 22 at the close of the chapter, Jeremiah concludes,

The punishment of your iniquity has been completed, O daughter of Zion; He will exile you no longer....

His closing lines affirm the certainty that justice is coming.

This marks the end of Jeremiah's lament. He has thoroughly processed through his grief, first at a safe distance, then in an intensely personal and subjective way when he discovered how loyally loving and compassionate his Lord was in the heart of his darkness. Then he has reprocessed his grief with the Lord until he perceived the ending of the cause of his sorrow, finally being able to look forward in hope. All that is left to do now is to pray over the whole thing with the Lord, petition him for restoration, and then leave it with him and go on.

Chapter 5 is the final prayer. The pain of suffering and the hope of restoration are expressed in intimacy with the Lord and left in his capable hands. As opposed to the lament in which Jerusalem remembers her own sorrows in chapter 1, this is a communal prayer of the remnant in Jerusalem that the Lord will remember all their sorrows. All the pronouns are in the first person plural: we, us, our. They begin the prayer with these words:

Remember, O LORD, what has befallen us;
Look, and see our reproach!

Then they turn over the whole disaster in summary to the Lord's hands, step by step.

The book ends with the final prayer in verses 19-22:

Thou, O LORD, dost rule forever; Thy throne is from generation to generation. Why dost Thou forget us forever; Why dost Thou forsake us so long? Restore us to Thee, O LORD, that we may be restored; Renew our days as of old, Unless Thou hast utterly rejected us, and art exceedingly angry with us.

Jeremiah and the community begin this final prayer by extolling the Lord's sovereignty: He rules forever and his throne is established over all the generations. Then they ask him the question burning in their own hearts: Why has salvation been so long in coming? Finally, they ask for the hope of their hearts---restoration. In Hebrew this literally reads, "Return us, O Lord, to You, and we shall return." They do not ask for a restoration of their material possessions or their former way of life; they pray for true spiritual restoration first and foremost. They have lost everything...Now all they want is the Lord himself. The final line, "...renew our days...unless Thou hast utterly rejected us, and art exceedingly angry with us," hints that God cannot possibly refuse to restore them in light of his loyal love and unfailing compassions; otherwise his anger would win out over his grace.

Now let's look at the form in which this lament is written.

Formal model of processing personal suffering

At the end of this paper in Figures 1 and 2 are an outline and a chart, respectively, describing the form of this book. Figure 2 shows a tight acrostic form underlying the book. Psalm 119 is the most famous example of an acrostic in Scripture. It is organized in the exact order of the Hebrew alphabet, from a to t, or as we would say, "from a to z." Lamentations 1-4 is all written according to a similar form, as Figure 2 shows. Only chapter 5 deviates from this form. Jeremiah's lament was very formalized; in fact, it is the most formalized book in the Hebrew Scriptures.

Why is this lament so formal; why not just weep and wail any way he pleased? Why are the first four chapters acrostics, but not the fifth? And if acrostics such as Psalm 119 are used elsewhere in the Hebrew Scriptures to aid the memories of people who would only hear them spoken orally, why does Jeremiah use acrostics to commemorate an event that no survivor could possibly forget---the burning of the beloved city and the temple? Just what is going on with all this formality?

This lament is written in this way to provide a comprehensive engagement with their personal suffering. Whenever we hear tales of woe like those I told at the beginning of our study, we usually get very uncomfortable. We want to quickly get through the bog of suffering in order to step onto the firm ground of hope in a good God. We are afraid of suffering, we abhor it, we want it to be over and done with as quickly as possible, no matter what it takes. But truly dealing with personal suffering doesn't work that way. You can't just wave it off. God wants to meet us very deeply and redemptively in the darkness of our grief, and lead us by the hand back into the light of his love and goodness.

Thus Lamentations is a guide for responsibly and comprehensively encountering our personal suffering, rather than running from it in denial or burying it under supposedly Christian platitudes. The reasons Jeremiah's laments are so formalized here are twofold: First, they are formalized to guard us from oversimplifying the process of overcoming grief, ensuring that we work through our grief "from a to z" until a point of resolution through prayer is reached. Second, they are formalized to provide a terminus for our grief; there is a "z," an endpoint so that we may move on. Sometimes when we are in the midst of suffering or trying to work through deep grief, it seems as if the pain is unending. But in Lamentations an endpoint is reached in the last verse of chapter 4, and a final prayer is left with a loving Father in chapter 5. That is how Jeremiah tells us that there is an end to the agonizing process of grieving. Thank God Jeremiah was so formalized in his song of lament!

Conclusion: applying this truth

We have looked at the content and the form of Jeremiah's lament. But I want to answer the question: How did the woman I spoke of and I handle our respective pain? The woman gave her pain to her Lord, and with him began a process of moving beyond her suffering to remembrance and restoration. She did something that is integral to the grieving process: She wrote out her pain in words on paper. There is something enormously helpful in this. David wrote out many of his most painful experiences in his poems in the Psalms. Jeremiah lamented by writing Lamentations. Likewise, we today need to write out on paper what is going on in our hearts and minds. You can write a journal, poetry, stories, objective news reports about what has happened to you, an autobiography, songs, or private letters to God, which is what I do; I call mine "Letters to my Father." The woman I shared about earlier wrote out her grief process in the following poem:

His Child

What child is this He's brought to life, Amidst the pain, Amidst the strife?

Who is this child Who's finding her tears, Sealed and condemned For all these years?

This child is me Strange but known, Edging closer To His throne.What love is this That covers shame? He lifts my eyes, Gives back my name.

Who is this love? His heart is wide. Sheltering grace, When I think I must hide. The love is God, The Almighty One, The Crucified Christ, The Glorified Son.

What friend is this, I've met today? God-ordained, To point His Way.

Who is this friend? Her own path to walk, Takes time to love, To share, to talk. This friend became "friends" His love multiplied. They laughed when I laughed, And cried when I cried.

The child found Love Through friends God-given. Who've helped to know The God up in heaven. Now He's no longer So far away. His Love blooms and grows In her heart every day.

This is a modern poem, but it is strikingly similar to Jeremiah's poetry in Lamentations. The woman approaches her pain as an objective viewer observing a child; she plumbs the depth of her pain and loneliness until she interacts profoundly with God himself; in that encounter in the deep pit of her pain, she finds God to be both loving and good; this encounter gives her renewed hope; then she finds herself in a community in the process of being restored. Her final stanza talks of her restoration to her Lord.

As for me, the night of my spiritual crisis was on the third weekend of January. The fourth weekend of January marked the time I fully committed myself to a deep relationship with Jesus Christ. I was at a Campus Crusade retreat at Lake Tahoe, and I recall vividly the time I spent in silent prayer at that retreat. During that prayer, I sensed the Lord asking me very quietly, "So who am I going to be in your life? Am I going to be Lord, or not?" There was only one answer to that question: I wanted him to be Lord more than I had ever wanted anything in my life. I finally knew how badly I needed him. So I gave him my whole life, nothing withheld. Now he defines all the slices in my life and their various sizes. He is in control, and I have the privilege of receiving his love and entering his rest. Thank God, I have been restored to him, and he is everything to me. I want him to be my greatest love, my closest confidant, my breath, my hope, my all. Through all our pain, knowing him and knowing we are loved by him is all that really matters in the end.

A. Remembering her violation, lonely Lady Jerusalem cries out in sorrow: Lamentations 1. (Objective remembrance of the pain "from a to z" in acrostic.)

B. Recalling the Lord's anger, Jeremiah tries to comfort Jerusalem: Lamentations 2. (Objective remembrance of the pain "from a to z" in acrostic; subjective pain seen in vs. 11.)

C. Personal remembrance of suffering: Lamentations 3:1-18. (Subjective remembrance...greatest depth of personal pain. Triple acrostic begins....)

D. Finding a compassionate Lord of loyal love, who is good!: Lamentations 3:19-39. (Finding God at the bottom of the pain. Heart of the book! Triple acrostic continues.)

C'. Personal response to the Lord: call to confession/prayer for justice: Lamentations 3:40-66. (Processing the pain in intimate relationship with our Lord. Triple acrostic ends.)

B'. Recalling the Lord's anger is spent, Jeremiah comforts Jerusalem--- suffering is completed!: Lamentations 4. (Processing the pain in intimate relationship with our Lord, "from a to z" in acrostic.)

A'. "Remember, O LORD...." The community of Jerusalem prays for restoration to the Lord!: Lamentations 5. (Final prayer of the community, leaving the pain with the Lord; prayer for restoration. No acrostic.)

Figure 1 Poetic outline of Lamentations: moving from suffering to remembrance to restoration

CH. 1: Verse: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Begins with: a b g d h w z j f y k l m n s [ p x q r v t

CH. 2: Verse: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Begins with: a b g d h w z j f y k l m n s [ p x q r v t

CH. 3: Verse: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 .... 64 65 66

Begins with: a a a b b b g g g d d d h h h w w w .... t t t

(Note the intensification of the triple acrostic in chapter 3.)

CH. 4: Verse: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Begins with: a b g d h w z j f y k l m n s [ p x q r v t

CH. 5: Corporate prayer of the community of Jerusalem. No acrostic; suffering was processed through "from a to z" in chapters 1-4. (Processing "from a to z" disallows denial, encourages comprehensive engagement with the Lord in all aspects of the grief, in order to move on in prayer.)

Figure 2 Acrostic form underlying Lamentations

Catalog No. 4446
LAMENTATIONS
by Dorman Followwill (followwill@aol.com)
Single Message
July 2, 1995

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