Look LORD! – Lamentations 1:11

11 All her people groan as they search for bread; they trade their treasures for food to revive their strength. Look, O LORD, and see how worthless I have become.

The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), La 1:11.

I’m using the NRSV rendering of this verse, but I would use something like “contemptible” for “worthless” in the final line of the verse.

We often hear a line like this from a child: “Look at me!” It’s a call for attention, for affirmation, and for reassurance. In the child it doesn’t come from a place of lament, or even all that likely from a place of failure. It’s simply a desire to be acknowledged in whatever way.

As believers, we ultimately find our value in our creator. We want to be affirmed. We want God to notice. Job’s cry through his complaints is that God needs to respond to him, to notice him and react. In the end, Job gets no answers to his spoken questions. What he gets is the clear evidence that God is there and aware of him.

For Israel in the exile one of the greatest threats was the loss of identity. So many people lost their identity in that same time frame. Centuries later you couldn’t really identify Moabites, Ammonites, or Philistines, for example. But you can still identify the descendants of the people of Judah.

Surviving this is intimately tied to lament. Lament acknowledges that things have gone wrong. It is our realization of how bad things have become. I’m sure some readers, should they continue to read this series at all, will be impatient at the dismal tone of these verses. Surely I could summarize everything up to 3:22 in one or two posts and then we could get on to the positive.

But sometimes our problems aren’t solved in that short of a period of time. One of the things that prevents solving problems and growing from them is the failure to acknowledge them.

Are you ready to say, “Look, LORD!” and then be honest with yourself about what the Lord sees? When that is done, healing can begin.

(Featured image generated by Jetpack AI.)