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They said to me, \u201cThose who survived the exile and are back in the province are in great trouble and disgrace. The wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates have been burned with fire.\u201d When I heard these things, I sat down and wept. For some days I mourned and fasted and prayed before the God of heaven. (Nehemiah 1:3-4)

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Rather than continuing on with the action of Nehemiah\u2019s story, I want to drag you back to the beginning of the book. Pastor Michael mentioned it yesterday, but it\u2019s worth coming back to again:

When Nehemiah heard the news that his people were in trouble and disgrace, and that his city\u2019s wall lay broken and burned\u2014the first thing he did was to weep. To mourn, to fast, and to pray. Acts of slowing down and paying attention to the impact of what he\u2019d just received. What a difference from our reactions today.

In the crazy-fast culture we live in, responses are immediate and extreme. No more than a rumor is needed to stir up a frenzy of gut-level reactions.

Something terrible occurred somewhere in the world? The positive responses immediately pour out through supportive hashtags into funding campaigns and news stories. When someone does something terrible, they can be exiled or cancelled from polite society just as fast through those same means turned cruel. But always the emphasis is on the immediacy of an active response. Something must be said or done. NOW. There\u2019s no time to sit with it, grieve, or pray through an appropriate response.

Nehemiah didn\u2019t grow up with a smartphone, of course. But there is still wisdom in his response for our digital age. Just because we can respond immediately, doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s always the most wise course of action. Nehemiah could have responded immediately too, by marching up to the king and demanding a solution for his people and city. He was, after all, a high administrative official with the ear of the King.

But instead, Nehemiah sat and wept. He took time for the full weight of this revelation to wash over him. He didn\u2019t turn away from it or distract himself with work or busyness to ignore it. And as he paid attention to the plight of his people and place, he also brought them in an act of attention before God. He fasted and prayed as he mourned for his people: bringing their plight before God both day and night in prayers of lament.

If you remember, lament is that act of taking the evil we face seriously, taking God seriously, and then submitting ourselves and our situations to Him. Nehemiah took the time to do just that. And it did take some time. The text tells us that at least four months passed before Nehemiah would speak to the King about what was on his heart.

Now there\u2019s a lot of evil manifest in our world right now, too. Maybe some of it impacts you, maybe some of it doesn\u2019t. But there is plenty of evil to lament none-the-less as we take the evil of our world seriously before the God whose told us it\u2019s not supposed to be this way.

It is a much easier thing to pick up your phone or get online and fire off some smart posts or distract yourself from life altogether, but that response leaves us feeling more self-righteous and lonely in the long run. Lament and the acts of attention to our situations and to God that it calls us to is a much harder and time-consuming process. But, in the end, we find ourselves humbly sitting in true relationship with our God and perhaps also in better relationship with our world and neighbours too.

So, for all those places where things are not the way they are supposed to be today, and indeed there are many: will you take the time to stop and submit yourself, your attention, and these pains of the world to God in the space of lament? All the world is crying out for you to do something or say something now, but what if you began first by feeling it yourself and bringing it before God in the slow action of attention that is prayer?

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