This I Recall to My Mind

There is a sentence in Lamentations 3 that people put on mugs, and it sits four verses after one of the most honest descriptions of a bad memory in Scripture.

Start with the honest one.

Remembering mine affliction and my misery, the wormwood and the gall. My soul hath them still in remembrance, and is humbled in me.Lamentations 3:19-20, King James Version

My soul hath them still in remembrance.

He is not describing a choice. He is describing what his memory does on its own, without being asked, on an ordinary morning. It brings back the affliction. It brings back the misery. It has them by heart, and it produces them, and the effect of that in him is what the older wording calls being humbled, which here means pressed down.

That is a man saying: my own mind has taken the other side.

Lamentations was written after Jerusalem fell in 586 before Christ. The city walls are down, the temple is burned, and the people are gone. And the book is written in a strict acrostic, letter by letter through the Hebrew alphabet, with chapter three running three verses to a letter, sixty six in all.

Which means somebody sat down in the ruins of a city and imposed a strict poetic form on his grief. That is not decoration. That is a man holding a shape around something that had no shape.

The whole thing turns on one small word

Now the verse everybody knows, and the word almost nobody notices.

This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope.Lamentations 3:21, King James Version

This.

He does not say I stopped remembering the affliction. He does not say the memory of it went away, and nothing in the chapter suggests it did. He says there is a second thing, and he goes and gets it, and he holds it in the same mind that has been producing the first thing all morning.

Recall to my mind is deliberate work. It is the act of fetching something rather than receiving it.

You are not at the mercy of what surfaces on its own. Lamentations 3:21 uses a verb of deliberate recall rather than a verb of forgetting, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that distinction alive for somebody whose mornings have been decided by whatever arrives first.

And here is what he goes and gets.

It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22-23, King James Version

Read the first half of that carefully, because it is not what a mug usually shows. It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed.

He is not saying things are good. He is saying: we are still here. That is the claim. Not restored, not comfortable, not vindicated. Not consumed. It is the lowest possible statement of mercy and it is made by a man standing in a burnt city, and it is true.

You have been kept, and the psalm of the ruins puts that at the bottom rather than at the top. The written word says not consumed rather than anything larger, and the same Spirit who kept the claim that modest is the reason it is available to somebody who cannot honestly say more.

Then they are new every morning, and I want to be careful with it, because it is often read as a promise that each day will feel fresh, and then the person for whom every morning feels identical adds one more failure to the pile.

The verse is not about how the morning feels. It is about what is issued. The mercies are new; the morning may be the same morning it has been for two years. Those are different sentences.

You were issued something new this morning whether or not the morning felt any different. Lamentations 3:23 attaches the newness to the mercies and never to the mood, and it is His Spirit who protects that difference for a person who has been failing an emotional test nobody set.

There is one more thing about this passage that matters enormously, and it is what comes after.

The book does not end here. Lamentations runs on for two more chapters, and it finishes on this: Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old. But thou hast utterly rejected us; thou art very wroth against us.

That is the last verse of the book. It ends unresolved.

So the hope in chapter three was not a resolution. It was a thing a man fetched in the middle, and kept, and went on grieving around. Which is exactly why it is usable.

You have a hope that was never required to end the grieving, and the book itself proves it by carrying on afterward. Lamentations 3:21 sits in the middle of five chapters and not at the end of them, and the same Spirit who left the book unresolved is the reason nobody has to be finished to hold this.