Learning to Lament With the Spirituals: A Six-Day DevotionalExemplo

Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child

Focus: Feeling desperate for home

“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. 

They say to their mothers, 

“Where is grain and where is wine?”

As they faint like a wounded man

In the streets of the city, 

As their life is poured out 

On their mother’s bosom” (Lam. 2:11–12).   

In his second lament, Jeremiah observes the Lord’s wrath on Jerusalem and wrestles with the Lord’s brutality. The iconic streets which once bustled with people, markets which overflowed with lush produce, and the chalices which joyfully bubbled over, now serve as relics, sheltering the desolate and taunting the dejected. Memories of festivals and days of feasts slip by as their nostalgia triggers more ache than anniversary acknowledgment—their majestic temple reduced to rubble and forsaken by both the Lord and his people. As Jeremiah looks around, he hardly even recognizes the city’s remains as home. What the prophet once prized as his precious hometown now lies in ruins. Although God’s judgment was warranted, the prophet struggles to understand the Almighty’s harsh dealings with his people. Does the Lord even think of these descendants of Abraham as his any more? 

The melancholy tune of the melanin people—in chorus with their rugged hands, warped skin, and fading memories of “home”—expresses a similarly puzzled sentiment. 

“Sometimes I feel like a motherless child

A long way from home” 

Disconnected from the ancestral geography and the savory sensation of freedom, these people’s somber tune amplifies the gravity of their exile. Did anyone genuinely care for them? Where and with whom could they truly belong? 

“True believers a long way from home

A long way from home”

The feeling of displacement is unique to neither Jeremiah nor the slaves; rather, both the weeping prophet and these slaves sang the song of all believers everywhere. Their melodies magnify the melancholy of our dual citizenship: at once, we are alive and active in the presently fading world as we await our eternal belonging in the life to come. As a result of our dual citizenship, we experience the joys of being in this world along with the miseries of being “not of” it. We sin, although we long to live righteous lives, and we suffer either at the hands of others or as a natural result of our own fallenness. Or both. We cannot escape this binary fellowship of sin and righteousness any more than we, as embodied beings, can escape our senses—if they are healthy—from smelling, tasting, seeing, or hearing to feeling. Yet, our souls long for rest from the balancing act of being "in" but not being "of."  And we thirst for true belonging. 

Although the church offers a glimpse into the kingdom, the belonging we await will be fully revealed only at the return of Christ and execution of evil and sin forever. 

Jeremiah and the slaves remind us that although we inhabit this world, we are merely sojourners, citizens of another country, a long way from home. 

THIN SPACE: Lament offers refuge for weary souls. The discipline provides space to honor harsh truths and simultaneously cling to ultimate hope. Stated another way, “Biblical lament calls for honesty and truth-telling about the broken state of society and the individual. The fullness of the story of God’s work requires a remembering of suffering and a willingness to enter into lament. Lament calls for an authentic encounter with the fullness of truth.”  

LISTEN: “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child.”

As you listen and after you finish, lament honestly. Identify your disappointments or where you feel disillusioned. In what ways are you suffering? Write out your lament and offer it to the Lord. 

 
Photo by Kat J on Unsplash