Renew our days

Listen to a prayer rising at the very end of a wilderness, the last words of a book that has held nothing but grief for five long chapters. The city is rubble, the songs are gone, the people have wept until weeping ran dry, and then, from the bottom of all of it, the book of Lamentations turns its face upward and asks one thing. Turn us back to yourself, LORD, and we shall be turned; renew our days. Notice what it does not ask. It does not beg to go back, to rewind to the days before the catastrophe, to undo the years and pretend they never happened. It asks God to renew the days, to make them new on the far side rather than restore the old ones. And notice who does the turning. Not the praying soul, straining to right itself one more time; the soul has stopped trying to turn itself and is asking God to do the turning. The disorientation does not close with the wilderness magically undone. It closes with a turning, a worn-out people handing the work over, and reaching, even from the bottom, for a morning when they will be satisfied at last.

As your own wilderness closes, this is the prayer for it, and it is not the one you might expect. You will be tempted to pray for a return, to ask God to give you back the life you had before the upheaval, to set the clock to a morning before everything broke. This prayer asks for something better and harder. Not rewind, but renewal. Not the old days handed back, but new days given. And it changes who is doing the work. You have spent the whole wilderness trying to turn yourself, to fix it, to climb out by your own strength, and you are exhausted by the effort because it was never yours to do. So hand it over. Stop trying to turn yourself and ask God to turn you, because that is the one prayer the worn out can still pray, and it is the prayer He answers. Turn me, Lord, for I cannot. Renew my days. Satisfy me, finally, in the morning. He turns the ones who stop turning themselves and ask.