A devotional for the season when sorrow feels like rejection.

When sorrow asks whether you have been cast off forever, do you treat the question as settled fact? Lamentations does not deny grief. It places a limit around it: the Lord will not cast off forever. Your pain may feel like a verdict, but feeling abandoned is not the same as being abandoned.

The deeper danger is the refuge you build from sorrow. You may turn grief into a shut gate, reading each loss as proof that God is unwilling to receive you. That refuge feels honest because it agrees with pain, but it opposes Lamentations’ logic: grief is real, yet compassion is present. God does not afflict willingly; his lovingkindnesses are a multitude, not a thin exception.

God’s compassion is not vague sentiment. In Christ, God has come near to human grief. At the cross, the Son bore judgment to secure mercy for sinners. The risen Christ intercedes, so your sorrow is held before the Father by a living Mediator. Your sorrow is held within compassion, not outside it. Will you bring this sorrow to Christ without calling yourself cast off?