Lamentations 3:8 Meaning and Explanation

This may be the hardest affliction of all: 'when I cry and shout, he shutteth out my prayer.' It is one thing to suffer; it is another to feel that one's cries to God go unheard, as though heaven's door were barred against them. The man does not stop praying, but his prayers seem to find no entrance.

Many of the faithful have known this silence, the sense that God has closed his ear. The poem does not pretend it away. Yet the very fact that the sufferer keeps crying and shouting shows a stubborn faith underneath the despair. He prays still, even feeling shut out, and Scripture will show before the chapter ends that the prayer was heard after all, though heaven seemed silent for a time.