Since my people are crushed, I am crushed;
    I mourn, and horror grips me.
Is there no balm in Gilead?
    Is there no physician there?
Why then is there no healing
    for the wound of my people?
Jeremiah 8:21-22 (NIV)

Being an amateur student of family history, I have gained a certain appreciation for how Story plays out across generations. My great-grandfather took a large risk coming to America alone as a young man. There is little or no primary source material available to us, but I would have to believe that he was forced by circumstance simply to focus on making a life for himself. Carpentry was what he knew. His father having died when he was young, he went to work as a wooden dowel maker as a boy to help provide for his family. In the States he eventually opened his own hardware store.

I can only speculate what my great-grandfather hoped for his descendants. He was intent that my grandfather get a college education. My grandfather was the first in our family to do so. And so my father after him, becoming a CPA. And so my siblings and I after my father, having greater opportunities afforded us than my great-grandfather could have dreamed.

So it is with the Story. My grandparents’ generation suffered through two world wars and the Great Depression. I grew up hearing the stories of hard times, making ends meet, and sacrificing much to stave off the threat of tyranny of Germany and Japan. I have been afforded much because they suffered much.

Jeremiah is traditionally known as “the weeping prophet.” He mourned as he prophesied the destruction of his city and the suffering of his people, then he suffered through the unspeakable circumstances as his own prophetic predictions came to pass.

In today’s chapter, the weeping prophet mourns and grieves for his people as he predicts the dark times to come. He then asks a rhetorical question:

Is there no balm in Gilead?
    Is there no physician there?
Why then is there no healing
    for the wound of my people?

Eventually, Jeremiah’s own prophetic vision will see future generations and a “new” and “everlasting covenant” God will make through Jesus. Many generations after Christ, the hymn writers answered Jeremiah’s question with their own verse, which I remember singing as a child:

There is a balm in Gilead
To make the wounded whole;
There is a balm in Gilead
To heal the sin-sick soul.
Some times I feel discouraged,
And think my work’s in vain,
But then the Holy Spirit
Revives my soul again.

The rhetorical question of a prophet suffering through his chapter of the Great Story is answered by the echo of verse two thousand years later by poets afforded the opportunity to experience the fulfillment of Jeremiah’s visions.

This morning I am thinking about my own generation. I’m thinking about the things we experience, the things we suffer, and the rhetorical questions we ask ourselves. I’m hearing a lot of big rhetorical questions being asked of late. As with previous generations who paved the road for my journey, I am living out my chapter of the Great Story and paving the way for Milo’s journey and the generations who will come after. I am mindful this morning of the responsibility, and even heart-ache, that comes accompanies each generation’s chapter of the Story.

In the quiet my heart is whispering a few rhetorical questions of my own, and wondering what the echo of future generations will be.