Every Single Morning

It is because of Yahweh’s loving kindnesses that we are not consumed, because his compassion doesn’t fail. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. (Lamentations 3:22-23, WEB)

Lamentations is a book written in the middle of ruin, by a man watching everything he loved fall apart, and it is exactly there, in the rubble, that one of the most tender lines in Scripture appears. Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. He is not writing from a mountaintop after a victory, with the crisis safely behind him. He is writing from the ashes, and he still finds that mercy showed up again with the sunrise.

For a man in a long fight, the word new is where the hope lives. Yesterday you may have spent the whole supply, drained it dry with a relapse and a night of self-loathing that ran into the early hours. You wake expecting the account to be overdrawn, expecting God to be short with you because you already used up your chances, maybe convinced you have finally reached the end of his patience. Instead the mercy is new, freshly made, as if the previous day's failure did not deplete tomorrow's grace at all.

This is not mercy that runs thin the longer your struggle drags on. It is replenished while you sleep, and it is waiting when your eyes open, whether last night was clean or a wreck. The man who has failed a thousand times draws from the same full supply as the man on his best week, because the supply was never yours to earn or spend down. It comes from him, and he does not tire of making it. There will be mornings when you can hardly believe that is true, when the weight of the night before makes fresh mercy sound like a story told to children, and on those mornings you take it anyway and let the believing catch up later.

Lord, thank you that your compassion did not run out overnight. This morning I take the mercy that is new, and I ask you to walk today with me.