Lamentations 3:24–25
Most of us know the strange quiet of a waiting room. The muffled television, the magazines nobody reads, the clock that seems to move slower than it should. Somebody else has the news. All we can do is sit there and wait for it.
Jeremiah wrote Lamentations from a version of that quiet, only worse. Jerusalem was in ruins. The temple was rubble. Everything he had built his life around was gone. By chapter three, his grief turns inward: “My soul continually remembers it and is bowed down within me” (Lam. 3:20, ESV). Then, in the next breath, something shifts. In the middle of the wreckage, hope finds a foothold.
“But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning” (Lam. 3:21–23, ESV). Then comes the line that gives this article its center: “‘The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore I will hope in him’” (Lam. 3:24, ESV). A portion was the piece of land you actually owned, your one inheritance. Jeremiah had lost his. What remained wasn’t a possession. It was a Person.
“The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him” (Lam. 3:25, ESV). Waiting here isn’t passive. It’s aimed. Jeremiah wasn’t waiting for his circumstances to improve. He was waiting on God himself, the way you wait on someone you actually trust.
We don’t wait well. We want the test results before we hang up the phone. We want the marriage healed on our timeline, the job offer this week, the wandering child home by Sunday. When those things don’t come on schedule, it’s tempting to make something smaller our portion instead: a paycheck, a body that still cooperates, a relationship that hasn’t disappointed us yet. Those things can hold weight for a while. None of them can hold the weight Jeremiah needed held.
Later in the same chapter, Jeremiah writes, “You have taken up my cause, O Lord; you have redeemed my life” (Lam. 3:58, ESV). He didn’t yet know how completely that would come true. We do. “We have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous” (1 John 2:1, ESV). Our portion was never something we secured by holding on tightly enough. It’s Christ, who took up our cause when we couldn’t, and whose mercy is new every morning, not because we earned yesterday’s.
Carry this into the week ahead. What are you treating as your portion right now, the thing you’re gripping because it feels like there’s nothing else to hold onto? The next time the results are slow, the marriage isn’t healing on your timeline, or the phone call you’re waiting for doesn’t come, loosen that grip. Remember what Jeremiah remembered in the rubble. The Lord was his portion in the ruins of Jerusalem. He can be ours in whatever waiting room we’re sitting in this week.
