jeremiah.

Notice how realistic Jeremiah’s perspective has become.  It contains a reality that didn’t exist before.  He allows for more suffering in the future, more slaps in the face, more moments of unbearable aloneness . . . Jeremiah wept and God saw.  He cried and God heard.  He is not the God who waves the magic wand and makes the Babylonians or the cancer go away.  He is the God who sees and hears and enters into the suffering with his suffering people in the wilderness.  This God, Jeremiah could never have known in the marble palaces of Jerusalem, only from the windy cave that now overlooks the ruined city.

The one who looks down, along with us, from the cave, exhausted, bleary-eyed, is no finished product in the end.  He is, along with you and me, submitted to a process of coming to know this remarkable God who is moved by our tears, who even weeps along with us.

– Michael Card, A Sacred Sorrow