Nothing Left But Mercy

Lamentations 3:19–26

KJV — "The LORD is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him."

NASB95 — "The LORD is good to those who wait for Him, To the person who seeks Him."

ESV — "The LORD is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him."

There was a season when I could have written my own inventory of loss and it would have been short. Drugs had taken hold, and every decision I made after that was the wrong one. I did not simply lose things — I dismantled them. My family. My work. My future. When I finally sat still in a cell in Changi, the honest accounting was this: nothing left. Really nothing.

Jeremiah begins in the same place. He does not rush past the ruin to reach the comfort. He turns it over in his hands first — "Remembering mine affliction and my misery, the wormwood and the gall" (v. 19). Only then does he say the thing that changed everything for me: "It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness" (vv. 22–23). Notice what he does not claim. He is still in exile. Nothing has been restored yet. What he has is mercy that arrived before the restoration did.

That is exactly how it came to me. God did not wait for me to be presentable. Mercy found me on the inside — through a Crossroads Bible study, through Pastor Paul Tan sitting with a man who had nothing to offer him. The Caffeine Experience was conceived in a prison cell, not a boardroom, because that is where the mercy was.

So when I stand behind the bar at The Gateway now with men and women whose accounting reads like mine did, I am not there as the one who fixed himself. I am there as evidence. The LORD is good to those who wait for Him. My qualification is not a clean record. It is a mercy I did not earn, showing up new again this morning.

Father, You met me when there was nothing left of me to commend. Thank You for compassions that do not fail and mercies that arrive before the rebuilding. Make me a patient guide to those still counting their losses, and let them find You there — not at the end of their waiting, but in it. Amen.