Today the Bible weeps. Lamentations opens with the city personified as a widow in the night: how deserted lies the city, once so full of people. Bitterly she weeps, with no one to comfort her.

Grief this careful, five poems, most in careful acrostics, means sorrow was taken seriously enough to craft. God gave His people an alphabet for anguish. Some of you need it this season.

Lamentations exists because faith does not skip funerals. The poems blame honestly, grieve thoroughly, and keep speaking to the same God whose hand they acknowledge in the ruin. That combination, accusation and address, is what biblical lament is: pain that refuses to hang up the phone.

Philemon, one page long, shows what the God on the other end of the line does with wreckage: a runaway becomes a brother, a debt gets absorbed, charge it to me. The city's streets will fill again. Meanwhile, pour out your heart like water. He keeps every drop.