Fresh Mercy, Even Here

Most of us have seen this verse on a coffee mug, or on a kitchen sign with a little painted sunrise behind it. It feels like a verse for a nice morning. But Jeremiah didn’t write it on a nice morning.

He wrote it sitting in what was left of Jerusalem. The city had been burned and the Temple was gone. People he loved were dead or had been marched off to Babylon. The book he wrote about it is called Lamentations, so you already know nobody was passing out party hats. In the lines before this verse he doesn’t hold anything back. He tells God exactly how bad it is, and he admits he’s forgotten what good days even look like.

Then, right in the middle of all that grief, he catches himself: “Yet I still dare to hope when I remember this.” And out comes the line we put on mugs.

Look at what didn’t change. The walls were still down, and the smoke was probably still hanging in the air. Nothing around Jeremiah had moved an inch. What moved was what he chose to remember. He looked past the rubble to the God who was still standing, and he saw that God’s mercy had shown up that morning the same way it showed up the morning before. It wasn’t leftover mercy, and it wasn’t yesterday’s reheated. It was fresh.

Maybe you walked into this Monday dragging last week behind you: the argument that never got settled, the bill still sitting on the counter, the thing you swore you’d quit and didn’t. You don’t have to clean all of that up before God will meet you. Jeremiah didn’t. He was sitting in the ashes when he wrote the most hopeful line in the whole book.

So whatever is still lying around your life this morning, God’s mercy got there first. Before your alarm went off, today’s mercy was already waiting for you.

Carry This With You

“The faithful love of the LORD never ends! His mercies never cease. Great is his faithfulness; his mercies begin afresh each morning.” – Lamentations 3:22-23