Finding Hope in Lamentations
Updated: Sep 1
Yesterday, our church completed its annual two-week educational program known as Wave. Among its activities, volunteers teach English at levels ranging from beginner to B2.
As I reflect on our sixteenth Wave program, I know that every volunteer could tell countless stories. Yet one unfinished story has touched my heart deeply and continues to awaken hope within me.
Last week, I found myself wrestling with a difficult question:
Can hope be found in the lament of someone who has survived unspeakable loss?
This year, one of our participants was a survivor of the Srebrenica genocide of 1995. While his pregnant wife was placed on a bus leaving Srebrenica, he began the dangerous journey toward Tuzla, hoping to survive.
His wife had been accompanied by two male relatives, but they were not permitted to board the bus. They remained behind and were later killed. To this day, she carries the trauma of that moment and wonders whether she could have done something differently to save them.
Amir joined our project this year. Almost every conversation with him returned to what had happened to him and his family in 1995. Thirty years later, the story was still present, asking to be heard.
During one of my English classes, I felt inspired to share Maya Angelou’s poem Still I Rise, a powerful declaration of dignity and resilience written by a woman whose life and work were shaped by suffering.
The following day, Amir told me that translating the poem at home had stirred deep sadness within him. He cried as unresolved memories and pain from three decades earlier came to the surface. Once again, he found himself asking why he had survived when so many male relatives and friends had not.
As he reflected on the poem, its final declaration spoke personally to him:
“I am the dream and the hope of the slave.”
While facing the pain of his trauma, Amir began to recognize a new sense of purpose: perhaps he had survived so that he could inspire hope in others.I do not know how this hope will unfold in Amir’s life or within his family. His story is still being written. Yet something about that moment awakened hope in me as well.
When I returned home that day, my attention was drawn to a reproduction of a painting that had been hanging on my wall for ten years. My late friend Phyllis had given it to me with the intention that I would one day pass it on to someone from Srebrenica. The original artwork had been created by a Christian artist in the United Kingdom. After watching news reports about Srebrenica on the BBC, he began praying for its people.
During prayer, he envisioned light descending from the sky, a white dove, and new wildflowers springing from wounded ground. What he saw in that place of prayer filled him with hope, so he painted the vision.
Phyllis purchased a reproduction and entrusted it to me. She later passed away, and the painting remained on my wall as the years went by.
Then I met Amir.
I began to wonder whether the time had finally come to pass the painting on to the person for whom it had been waiting. As I considered giving it to him, I held on to the hope that faith, compassion, and reconciliation can overcome division and hatred in this part of the world.
The painting does not erase what happened. Hope does not ask survivors to forget their losses or silence their grief. Instead, it offers a quiet testimony that hatred does not have to write the final chapter.
As we begin a new week, I invite you to join me in reading the book of Lamentations. It may seem unlikely that steadfast hope could be found in a book filled with sorrow, but lament and hope are not opposites. In Scripture, they often exist together.
The Hebrew word yachal carries the meaning of waiting and hoping with expectation. It points toward a hope that does not deny pain or demand immediate answers. It is the kind of hope that remains—sometimes quietly and painfully—while continuing to trust God.
This week, as you read Lamentations, I invite you to pray for someone who has experienced trauma. Pray with compassion, without rushing their healing or trying to explain their pain.
If you have lived through a traumatic experience and would like someone to pray with you, please feel free to send me a prayer request.
Hope does not always arrive as a sudden feeling of happiness. Sometimes it begins as a small light, a white dove, or a wildflower emerging from wounded soil. Sometimes it is found in a poem, a painting, a painful conversation, or the courage to keep waiting.
And sometimes, after unspeakable loss, hope begins with the quiet realization that your life can still carry purpose.
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