On days when the headlines pile witness upon witness—conflict expanding, the displaced growing more desperate, aid withdrawing, waters rising—the instinct is to despair. Yet the prophet in Lamentations speaks not from a place of false comfort but from the depths of ruin itself, where he discovers that mercies are not earned by the world’s righteousness but given fresh each dawn. This is not a promise that suffering will end today, or that the powerful will suddenly choose restraint, or that the sea will give back what it has taken. It is something quieter and harder: an invitation to notice, in the wreckage, that we are still here, still capable of witnessing, still called to mercy. Faithfulness, the text suggests, is not the world’s but God’s—and it returns not when we deserve it, but when we most need it.