What Might YOU Rebuild

All her people groan
    as they search for bread;
they barter their treasures for food
    to keep themselves alive.
“Look, Lord, and consider,
    for I am despised.” - Lamentations 1:11

In the book of Lamentations, the prophet Jeremiah is heartbroken over the urban decay in Jerusalem. They are facing a particularly intense season of oppression, being surrounded by a foreign army and being unable to defend themselves. But what he’s talking about here is not simply in times of war - it describes what happens when brokenness becomes community wide.

A theologian many of us at City Church follow puts it this way:

Single cases of unhappiness are inevitable in our frail human life; but when there are millions of them, all running along well-defined grooves, reducible to certain laws, then this misery is not an individual, but a social matter, due to causes in the structure of our society and curable only by social reconstruction.

- Lisa Sharon Harper, The Very Good Gospel

Jeremiah is convinced that Yahweh is very interested in “social reconstruction,” as Lisa Sharon Harper put it. One of the pictures of it comes from the book of Isaiah:

They will rebuild the ancient ruins
    and restore the places long devastated;
they will renew the ruined cities
    that have been devastated for generations. - Isaiah 61:4

Take a moment to use a holy imagination: If the ‘they’ in Isaiah’s prophecy happened to be you, what would the particular social/structural issue be that you’d be call to rebuild?