A Lament from My Heart
“O that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people.”
– Jeremiah 9:1
I’ve carried a sickness and didn’t know its name.
I thought it was hurt. I thought it was betrayal. I thought it was them.
But it was pride.
A silent devourer inside me, whispering that the world owed me attention, respect, agreement. Whispering that if someone ignored me, they deserved my rage.
I see now—I was not the only one wounded.
I was also the one wounding.
“The pride that swells when I’m ignored is the same pride that deafened me to others. I have wept for being unheard, yet in my own silence, I wounded others more deeply than words ever could.
And now, in the ruins of my own heart, I finally hear the God I’ve ignored weeping for me.”
– Silent Truths | No. 17
The Sin of Silence
“Hear, O earth: behold, I will bring evil upon this people, even the fruit of their thoughts, because they have not hearkened unto My words, nor to My law, but rejected it.”
– Jeremiah 6:19
There were so many times I shouted in silence.
Not with my mouth—but with my need. My eyes, my posture, my soul—they were begging someone to listen. And when no one did, I closed off. Hardened. Seethed.
How dare they ignore me? How dare they brush past my words like I was air?
But now I see how many times I was the one walking past souls crying out in silence.
I tuned people out because I didn’t like the way they said something, or because I thought I already knew better. I rejected them without even knowing it.
And if I, a frail and bruised man, feel so deeply the sting of being unheard… How much more has God felt that silence?
His words, His pleas, His laments—how many have I ignored?
Not in rebellion, but in convenience.
Not in hatred, but in distraction.
“Told You So”
“They mocked the messengers of God, and despised His words…”
– 2 Chronicles 36:16
The most bitter sweetness I’ve ever tasted is the phrase
“I told you so.”
It rolls off the tongue like honey but becomes acid in the soul.
I’ve said it in my mind more times than my lips, but that doesn’t cleanse me.
I thought it was justice.
But it was ego, dressed in righteousness.
When I’m wronged, I fantasize about being proven right. I imagine the other finally seeing it my way.
But what kind of victory is that?
When they fall, I rise—but only in my mind. In reality, both of us have collapsed under the weight of our own pride.
I wonder now…
How often has God, righteous and holy, held back the words “I told you so” when I stumbled into the very ruin He warned me of?
He could have gloated.
But instead, He wept.
The Prophet Wept
“Mine eyes do fail with tears, my bowels are troubled, my liver is poured upon the earth, for the destruction of the daughter of my people…”
– Lamentations 2:11
When Jeremiah wrote these words, he was unraveling.
His grief wasn’t poetic—it was physical. Internal. He was coming apart from the inside out.
And now I understand that.
Because I’ve felt the same agony, sitting alone in my room, in the dead of night. Not because I lost something—but because I let pride take the wheel.
I destroyed what I loved. I shattered peace. I fed my bitterness like a pet and let it grow into a beast.
I blamed others.
But now I see my own reflection in their offenses.
I gave back the same wounds that I was wounded by.
I stabbed where I had been stabbed.
And in doing so… I joined the long line of humanity plunging blades into the heart of God.
Does It End?
“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”
– Jeremiah 17:9
My heart is not noble by default.
It’s clever. It’s defensive. It’s layered in a thousand masks that all say, “I’m the victim.” But God doesn’t look at my pain and say, “You’re excused.”
He looks deeper. He shows me the roots.
He shows me the empire I’ve built in my chest—fortified walls of pride, towers of silent judgment, and a throne built from the bones of my own self-righteousness.
I ask myself now—Where does this end?
In war? In silence? In isolation?
The answer isn’t clear. But the question is finally right.
I’ve stopped asking, “Why did they hurt me?”
And I’ve started asking, “Why did I think I was above hurting them?”
The world isn’t just broken around me. It’s broken through me.
And still… God is whispering. Still asking me to listen.
A Call to Listen
“Let us search and try our ways, and turn again to the Lord.”
– Lamentations 3:40
This is not the cry of someone shouting at the world.
It’s the cry of someone whispering to their own soul.
Turn again.
Not because the world heard me. Not because I was vindicated.
But because I finally heard Him.
