Eventide & Altar

Jeremiah's prayer arrives at the only question that has ever mattered: can the false gods send rain? Can anything else do what you alone can do? He has watched the false prophets and the false sources of security and the false comforts fail one by one, and at the end of the catalog he is left with the only thing still standing. Is it not you, O Lord our God, to whom we look? You alone have done all these things.

There is a particular version of this question that comes with age. The things you looked to that could not send rain - the status, the plans, the certainties that dissolved, the securities that didn't hold - you have had time to watch them fail. The question Jeremiah asks at the end of the drought is one you may have been answering for years without quite naming it - arriving slowly, until one day you find you are not looking anywhere else.

Jesus says the righteous will shine like the sun. Not the successful or the comfortable - the righteous. The ones who were wheat in a mixed field, who stayed faithful in the ordinary way across a long life. The ones who prayed through the hard things rather than around them. They will shine. That is the destination of what you have been doing.

Help us, O God our savior, on account of the glory of your name. Not on account of our merit. For your name.

The Sorrowful Mysteries today - Jeremiah weeping without rest, Jesus in Gethsemane. The suffering that becomes the path through which the shining arrives. Pray them for whoever in your life is in the weeping part, not yet at the shining.

• For those who have watched the false sources of security fail one by one and found themselves left with God alone, in gratitude for that arriving, we pray to the Lord.
• For those brought very low today - by illness, grief, loss, failure - that God's compassion would come to them quickly before they have to ask again, we pray to the Lord.
• For those we carry who are still looking to what cannot send rain, that the question would arrive for them as it arrived for Jeremiah: is it not you, Lord, to whom we look? we pray to the Lord.

Sit with Jeremiah's question. Is there something you have been looking to for life - for security, for hope, for the resolution of something - that has not been able to send rain? Name it honestly. Then say the question as a statement: you alone, Lord, are the one I look to. Let that be the prayer for today.