Daily Devotions

1 Where we are

Mdm Chua is fifty-eight, and on Saturday morning she buys two boxes of mooncakes, the way she has for thirty years. At noon she sets four stools at the table in the flat and cooks for three. Her daughter says nothing about the fourth stool. The second box sits by the rice bin, and she cannot work out where it is supposed to go before October. She is not confused about the arithmetic. She is afraid that if she buys one box next year, she will have agreed with everyone else that he is gone — and that holding his place is the last thing she can still do for him.

2 What the passage is doing

Jeremiah writes while the country is being emptied. Ramah, a few kilometres north of Jerusalem, was where captives were gathered before the long walk to Babylon, and families stood at that road watching their sons go. Rachel, the mother buried near there generations earlier, is pictured sitting up and weeping for children who are no longer in the land. Notice what God does with that sound. He does not correct it or call it too much. He repeats it back, word for word, before he says anything else.

3 Taking it with you

You may be sitting at a table like that yourself, or beside someone who is, and feeling the pull to make things easier by saying less. You do not have to. God wrote a mother's weeping into his book and left it unedited, and he did not file the far-off ones as lost. Jesus stood at his friend's grave and wept before he did anything about it, and at the cross he was counted among the missing so that nobody God loves is written off. Keep the stool out. Say the name aloud over lunch. Your grief is on the record, and this is not where the story ends.