More often than not, I am the cause of my own problems. Is that not true for you?
Look, O Lord, for I am in distress;
my stomach churns;
my heart is wrung within me,
because I have been very rebellious.
In the street the sword bereaves;
in the house it is like death.
Lamentations 1:20
But now that I’ve caused my own troubles, so what? Most of us will work our hardest to get out of it. In fact, we would do everything in our power to manipulate and change the problem into an opportunity. I’m not going to advocate for that here. Not that you shouldn’t be doing those things– to fix the things that caused these issues for you in the first place; but rather, I want us to understand the gravity of our distress and find ourselves so badly damaged by our own volition that we understand who we are if left alone: death.
The writer of this book has lost everything except his life. His country is in shambles. His friends and family are gone. There is absolutely nothing to hope for. All of this was self-inflicted through the decisions the writer and the people of this country made. If you’ve ever accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior then you know the feeling that this person is feeling.
In fact, the moment you accepted Jesus was probably at the precipice of stomach churning distress where you just cried to God and asked Him to look your way. What if we would try to just cry out to God and ask Him to just look at us? Would we, at that moment, stop causing more trouble for ourselves forever? Perhaps not. But what I do know is that when we cry to God and ask Him to look at us, He does– and that’s all we really need.
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