The Love That Will Not Let Go

Jeremiah had watched it all fall apart. He had warned the people for decades. They hadn't listened. And now the city he loved was burning, the people were captive, and he was sitting in the wreckage writing the worst kind of poem — a lament for what used to be.

The third chapter of Lamentations begins in the darkest place: "I am the man who has seen affliction by the rod of the LORD's wrath." He does not minimize. He does not rush past the pain. He describes loss with brutal honesty — driven into darkness, flesh made old, besieged, shut out, dragged to chains.

Then something turns. Not the circumstances — those are still terrible. But Jeremiah's gaze. He "calls to mind" something. He remembers. And what he remembers is this: the steadfast love of the LORD never ceases. His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning.

He is not saying everything is okay. He is saying that in the middle of everything being terrible, there is still something that has not failed — and that thing is enough to get up on.

Jesus told a story that would have irritated responsible shepherds: a man has a hundred sheep. One wanders. And rather than staying with the ninety-nine who are safe and accounted for, the shepherd leaves them and goes after the one.

Goes after. Not waits. Not sends someone. Not accepts the loss and does the math. He goes. He searches. He finds.

And when he finds it, he does not carry it back at arm's length. He lifts it onto his shoulders — which, for anyone who has spent time with sheep, is not a clean or pleasant experience. He carries it home rejoicing.

David had spent years in the fields as a shepherd before he was anything else. When he wrote that hesed would follow him all his days, he knew what it felt like to go after the lost one. He was writing from experience on both sides of the equation — as the shepherd who searched, and as the sheep who wandered.

Paul knelt to pray for people he loved and he found himself asking for something that outgrew his vocabulary. He prayed that they would be "rooted and established in love" — and then he began to describe the love he wanted them to know.

Wide. Long. High. Deep. He reached in four directions and said: this is what the love of Christ is like. And then he added something that should stop us cold: it "surpasses knowledge." You cannot fully think your way to the bottom of this love. You can only go deeper.

Paul then asked that they would be "filled to the measure of all the fullness of God." He was praying, essentially, that they would be able to hold as much of God's immeasurable love as a human being is capable of holding. Not a trickle but a flooding.

David saw the sky and said hesed is higher. Paul saw human capacity and said the love of Christ is greater. Both were describing the same reality: a love that cannot be capped or contained by any limitation we bring to it.