Have you ever felt like everyone is against you? Jeremiah did, and he’d mostly be right! God gave Jeremiah a message to give to God’s people. It was a message to repent from their sin, or else destruction would come when other nations attacked them. But life was good in Israel then, and they didn’t want to listen. They couldn’t make Jeremiah stop preaching, so they threw him in a pit.
This was a cistern, a big hole dug out of the hard desert soil. When you dig a well, you eventually hit water, and water fills the well from the bottom up. That doesn’t happen in the desert. Instead, it catches rainwater. Which, in the desert, is infrequent. When it rains in the desert, there are flash floods; the ground is too hard and can’t absorb the water, so it runs off, into the cistern. Along with the dung of animals, dirt, and debris. The people threw Jeremiah into this mess. In Jeremiah 38, he writes that he was lowered into the cistern, which had no water, only mud, and he sank into it. Yuck.
In Lamentations 3, Jeremiah complains about his situation. You can read more about it in verses 1-15. But notice verse 21. “All of these bad things are happening to me.”
“Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope.”
His circumstances didn’t change, but his perspective did. His focus did. Instead of focusing on the smelly mud up to his chest and the walls he couldn’t climb, he focused on the compassion, faithfulness, and love of God. These will never fail.
As we struggle through life’s hardships, we can change our focus. Instead of comparing our lives to what we wish they were, we can focus on the never-ending love of God. The love of God never changes, and that changes everything.
Pray: Dear God, your love and faithfulness never fail! Your compassion is new every morning. I can rely on that. Help me to focus on your faithfulness as I walk through this struggle. You will never leave me. Amen.