New Every Morning, Even in the Dark

Have you ever had a day so bad
that the morning after felt heavy?
When you wake up,
and for one small second you forget,
and then you remember,
and the sad comes back to sit on your chest.

There was a man who felt like that.
His whole city was broken.
Do you remember the city that sat down and cried?
This man was there.
The streets he loved were empty and burned.
He cried so much he thought
his tears would never stop.

He wrote down the worst of it.
I have forgotten what good even feels like.
I thought I would be happy again,
but maybe that part of me is gone.

That is a low place to be,
wondering in the dark
if anything good is left for you at all.

But right in the middle of all his crying,
the man remembered one thing.
And it was enough to hold on to.

This I call to mind, he said,
and so I have hope:

The love of God never runs out.
His kindness never gets used up.
They are new every morning,
new with every single sunrise.

The mercy you needed yesterday,
that was yesterday's mercy.
There is fresh mercy for today,
warm and waiting,
poured out new with the sunrise,
like bread still soft from the oven.

God does not love you a little less
because the day before was hard.
He has never once said,
that's enough now, I am tired of you.

Great is his faithfulness, the man wrote,
in the saddest book in the whole Bible.
God had made a promise long ago:
to be near, to be good, to never let go.
And here, in the ashes, the man chose to trust it.
Great is his faithfulness,
even here,
even in the dark,
even when I cannot feel it yet.

For the Lord is good
to the one who waits for him,
to the soul who keeps looking for him.
He will not throw his children away forever.
He does not enjoy our sadness.
When he lets us weep,
his own heart is tender,
and his mercy is bigger than the hurt.

The man could not see how far ahead God could see.
He could not know that one morning,
the brightest new morning there would ever be,
mercy itself would step out of a tomb.

Because a long time after this,
Jesus would lie in the dark of a grave,
and his friends would wake up
to the heaviest morning there ever was.

But when the sun came up,
the stone was rolled away.
And out walked the New Morning,
alive,
with the night undone behind him.

God had kept his promise.
Every word of it. New every morning.

So when you wake up heavy,
and you wonder if the good is gone,
remember the man who cried
and hoped anyway.

His mercies are new this very morning.
The brightest of all mornings has come already,
and one more sunrise is on its way,
the one after which the dark never comes back.