The Old Testament Book of Lamentations is not necessarily the place you would think to look to find encouragement and hope. Its writer Jeremiah is known as the weeping Prophet. And the five-chapter Book is comprised of five poems of lament expressing grief as deep and heavy as any ever written. Jerusalem has been destroyed by the Babylonians as agents of God’s judgment. The city lay in ruins and looked, from a modern perspective, like an atom bomb had been dropped on it. Starvation had compelled women to cook their own children. And Jeremiah expresses his bitter anguish…