Lamentations 3:1

"Handfuls of Purpose"

For All Gleaners

"I am the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of his wrath" Lam 3:1

The third chapter would seem to be the property of all sorrowful men. From century to century persons who have been subjected to great suffering have felt that this chapter has expressed their feeling and their aspiration better than any other human composition. Job's lamentation over the day of his birth, and Jeremiah's lamentation over his personal sufferings, are the heritage of sorrow throughout all time. We never know what sorrow is until we feel its personality. It is one thing to look upon sorrow at a distance, and to feel amazed that men can endure such burden and stress; and another to feel how weighty is the burden, and how hard to bear is the stress that urges us downwards. Yet this personality of sorrow is enriched with many advantages. Every man must have his own sorrow, must receive sorrow into his nature, so that the whole plan of life may, so to say, be saturated with tears, and be made to know how much weight God can lay upon human life, as if he were heaping it up in cruelty. What would be sorrow to one man would be no sorrow to another; hence the infinite variety of the divine visitation of our life. God knows where the stroke would hurt us most, and there he delivers the blow, so that we may know ourselves to be but men. Every man having a sorrow of his own is thereby tempted to make a species of idol of it. It is curious to observe how variously sorrow is treated by men. It is possible for even death itself to become a kind of commonplace in the family; child after child may have died, and friend after friend may have departed, until death is looked for with a kind of resigned expectancy. Are there not persons who make a luxury of this kind of sorrow? Are they not pleased to be the objects of social interest and sympathy, instead of being humbled by their losses and taught to seek the true riches which are in heaven? Are they not inclined to allow their sorrow to evaporate through much sighing and speaking in vain? Silent sorrow is the most poignant. If sorrow could sometimes shed tears it would be relieved of its keenest agony. In many cases it is impossible for the sufferer to give expression to his distress, and therefore he is deprived of all the compensation and holy excitement to be derived from earnest and intelligent human sympathy. If a man has not seen affliction, what has he seen? The deepest students of human life assure us that unless joy has in it somewhat of a tinge of melancholy it is not pure gladness. When the fool delights himself with laughter he supposes himself to be glad. Fools can have no real joy, because they can have no real sorrow; even when loss falls upon them they are not sufficiently in earnest to estimate the value of that of which they are deprived; frivolity, lightness of mind, superficiality of thought can never know the height and depth and intensity of truest joy. How often is men's moral condition as to happiness estimated by the expression of the countenance! We look upon men and say, How sad they are! when in very deed their joy is broad and deep. It is a fatal mistake to suppose that frivolity and gladness are equivalent terms. Yet, on the other hand, who could steadfastly and continuously look only at the sorrowful side of life? Sorrow coming upon sorrow, like storm following storm, would take out of life all its joy and all its hope. We must look at both sides of the picture; we must allow the light and the shadow to interplay, and judge not by the one nor by the other, but by the result.