Turn Thou Us

"Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old."

This is the last prayer in a chapter that is mostly a list of losses. "Our inheritance is turned to strangers, our houses to aliens." "We have drunken our water for money; our wood is sold unto us." "Servants have ruled over us: there is none that doth deliver us out of their hand." "The elders have ceased from the gate, the young men from their musick." Nothing on the list is exaggerated, and none of it is answered.

Look at which way things move in this prayer. The people do not promise to turn; they ask God to turn them. The second half, "and we shall be turned," is what will follow if He does it, so even their turning rests on Him. They have already admitted whose fault the ruin is, without softening it: "The crown is fallen from our head: woe unto us, that we have sinned!" And just before this prayer they have named the one thing still standing: "Thou, O LORD, remainest for ever; thy throne from generation to generation."

Then the book ends: "But thou hast utterly rejected us; thou art very wroth against us." The Hebrew can also be read as a question. Either way, that is the last verse, and no answer is recorded after it. When Lamentations is read aloud in the synagogue, verse twenty-one is read again after verse twenty-two, so that the reading does not stop in the dark. That custom does not change the printed page, and Lamentations is not the only page like it. Psalm 88 ends with "Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness," and then it stops. God kept prayers like these in His book, and that tells us He is willing to hear them.

So pray it as it stands: "Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old." Lord, we cannot do this from our side. We bring nothing that could move You, and we will not pretend that we do. But You remain for ever, and Your throne has not fallen with ours. Renew our days as of old. We are asking from here, tonight, with the list still true. Amen.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 119 is Everlasting Joy (Isaiah 35:10).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two