Every Single Morning

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. 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. You wake expecting the account to be overdrawn, expecting God to be short with you because you already used up your chances. 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.

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.