Streams of tears flow from my eyes because my people are destroyed. – Lamentations 3:48

Today’s Scripture Reading (May 19, 2017): Lamentations 3

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in his allegorical fable “The Little Prince,” comments that “It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.” If you dare to put time into anything, that thing that consumes your time will become important. Some might argue the reverse, that we invest time into the things that we already believe are important, but either way, time spent becomes an evaluating tool of the things that we hold to be important.

For Jeremiah, the journey is complicated. In his Lamentation, he feels that God has personally crushed him and broken his bones (Lamentations 3:4). Then he realizes that God’s love is great; that God’s compassions never fail because they are fresh, new every morning (Lamentations 3:22-23). There is a wind in Jeremiah’s sail that offers to lift him from the depression through which he traveling. And just as we think that the weeping prophet might find joy once again, his eyes land one more time on the broken city of Jerusalem – the city that had become the prophet’s rose and the recipient of copious amounts of the prophet’s time. And once again the tears begin to flow.

Jeremiah could have walked away from the city. He could have declared the word of the Lord and then left with the others who had abandoned the doomed city. But Jeremiah had decided to stay with the people of the city, hoping that, in the last act, the people would respond to appropriately to God and God might change his mind and stop the destruction. But neither had happened. Jeremiah’s rose didn’t just die, it was ripped and torn until the beauty that it had once possessed was utterly destroyed, and as far as Jeremiah was concerned, the destruction was permanent.

Jeremiah had given his time to the time to the city. Time invested had made the city important. And there was no ending moral of the story that made the destruction of the city a beautiful thing. Just over six hundred years after Jeremiah, another prophet would look at the rebuilt city of Jerusalem and once again weep because Jerusalem was about to be once again be destroyed.

As he [Jesus] approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes.  The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you (Luke 19:41-44).”

Or maybe they did not recognize the time that God had invested in them, revealing their incredible importance to the Creator of the world.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Lamentations 4