I Am the Man That Hath Seen Affliction

The Shelter

Lamentations opens its most personal chapter with this blunt self-identification: I am the man that hath seen affliction. Not a general observation about suffering in the world, but a specific, first-person claim, this particular writer naming his own affliction as real and worth recording in scripture’s own words, at length, without hurrying past it.

Notice the writer does not soften the description of where he currently finds himself: into darkness, but not into light. He does not add a qualifying phrase promising the light is just around the corner, not yet, not in this verse. The darkness is stated plainly, as the actual present reality, before any turn toward hope arrives later in the same chapter.

This chapter of Lamentations is instructive precisely because of what it does later, several verses on, turning toward some of scripture’s most quoted words of hope and faithfulness. But that turn does not erase or invalidate these opening verses. Both belong in the same chapter, the same honest record, the darkness and the eventual hope both true, spoken by the same voice.

If you are currently closer to these opening verses than to the hope that follows later in this same chapter, you are not behind schedule in your grief. You are exactly where this ancient, inspired lament also began, before it, too, eventually turned.