Therefore the land shall mourn. —Hosea 4:3
Ecologist and pastor Andi Lloyd writes of the Hebrew prophets’ understanding that the land itself grieves with its people:
In the Hebrew Bible, mourning is an expansive practice. The people mourn, of course, but so do the land, the pastures, and the deep springs. Even gates and walls lament. The Hebrew verb abal, translated here [in Hosea] as “mourn,” also carries the meaning “to dry up, to wither.” Where a widow might put ashes on her head, the land and pastures and springs mourn by withering and drying up—all ways of speaking aloud the truth of inward grief.
Therein lies the power of lament: to speak the truth that all is not well. Walter Brueggemann writes that grief, spoken aloud, is “the counter to denial.” [1] Lament is prophetic speech. It bears faithful witness to all that is not right with the world and to all that is not right with ourselves. To take the land’s mourning seriously is to ask about its grief—to wonder what truth the land’s grief spoke to the people in Hosea’s day and what truth it might speak to us now.…
The land’s lament speaks a foundational ecological truth: when one part of creation goes awry, the whole suffers. The land’s grief at what the people have done points to the fundamental reality of our interconnection. Perhaps it is the boundedness of our bodies that makes it so easy to overlook the truth of our connectedness. We appear so discrete, so unitary, but we are not.
Lloyd describes our interconnectedness with God, each other, and the earth on which we dwell:
Our lives are held, connected, one to the other and all to God: we are bound up in a beautiful, multicolored, homespun fabric. That fabric is an ecological truth: it describes the deeply interconnected and interdependent world that I came to know as an ecologist. And that fabric is a theological truth, reflecting the world as God made it to be—a relational world, a connected world, an interdependent world.
The land’s mourning speaks simultaneously of a vision of the world as it ought to be—that beautiful fabric—and the truth of the world as it is: too much injustice and too little love fraying the threads that hold us all. The land feels those fraying threads. The land grieves those fraying threads. The land mourns.
Now, as then, the fabric that connects all of creation is badly torn: torn by manifold injustices wrought and perpetuated by the exploitative systems in which we live, torn by ideologies of scarcity that teach us to love too narrowly and too little. To mourn is to speak that truth to the lies that prop up the denial on which the status quo depends.….
Mourning together, in true solidarity, we name the truth of what’s wrong. And in so doing, we begin to make it right.
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Sarah Young Jesus Listens
Refreshing Lord Jesus, I come to You for rest and refreshment. My journey has been a strenuous, uphill climb, and I am bone-weary. Help me not to be ashamed of my exhaustion but to see it as an opportunity to rely more fully on You. Please keep reminding me that You can fit everything into a plan for good, including the things I wish were different. I need to just start with where I am right now—accepting that this is where You intend for me to be. As I lean on You for support, I can get through this day—one step, one moment at a time. My main responsibility is to remain attentive to You, asking You to guide me through the many decisions I must make. This sounds like an easy assignment, but I find it quite challenging. My desire to live in awareness of Your Presence goes against the grain of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Much of my weariness results from my constant battle with these opponents. But I won’t give up! Instead, I will hope in You—trusting that I will again praise You for the help of Your Presence. In Your worthy Name, Amen
ROMANS 8:28 AMPC; We are assured and know that [God being a partner in their labor] all things work together and are [fitting into a plan] for good to and for those who love God and are called according to [His] design and purpose.
PROVERBS 3:5 AMPC; Lean on, trust in, and be confident in the Lord with all your heart and mind and do not rely on your own insight or understanding. In all your ways know, recognize, and acknowledge Him, and He will direct and make straight and plain your paths.
PSALM 42:5 NASB; Why are you in despair, O my soul? And why have you become disturbed within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise Him For the help of His presence.
Young, Sarah. Jesus Listens (p. 116). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.
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