When I read this I’m overawed by the faithfulness of Paul in his prayers. The Christians there had not come to faith through Paul, and he had not met most of them. Yet he never stopped praying for them.

How often do we allow the pressures of life to become an excuse for our lack of prayer?

When the risen Christ confronted Saul/Paul on the Damascus road, Paul’s whole life was radically changed. He turned from flushing out Christians in Damascus to kill them, to joining with them in worshipping their God whom he now knew. He turned from hate and rage to love and peace.

The book starts with an outpouring of pain, first expressed through the narrator (vv 1–9b,10,11b,17) and then through Jerusalem personified as a woman, Daughter Zion (vv 9c,11c–16,18–22).

Jerusalem’s desolation is total. All her former glory is gone.

Listening to the outpouring of someone else’s grief as we do in these verses can be painful and disturbing. The expressions of pain and the horror of the situation grow in intensity, with mothers reduced to eating their own dead children (v 20). Nothing remains of the past; everything is black and hopeless.

The mood changes. The speaker here is a man who in his own personal pain mirrors something of the pain of Jerusalem. The Hebrew word for man here implies a man of strength or valour; this makes his condition all the more moving. It is debated whether he is to be identified with the narrator of the earlier chapters.

Psalm 88 may be the darkest of all the lament psalms. While most laments end with a note of praise, Psalm 88 ends with the plaintive statement that “darkness is my only companion” (v 18). The psalmist tells us that he has been sick and near death since he was a child (v 15). He has been abandoned by his friends and relatives (v 18).

Just as we have a vision for our lives – all the places we will go and the things that we will do – so too will we have a vision for our children. When we become parents, some of our visions, as well as our wisdom, we will pass on to our children – to help their lives be even better than our own.