Today is the 29th day of October.

I am Brian coming to you from the island of Crete.

Welcome. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I'm Brian.

It is wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.

Deeply, deeply, deeply grateful to be here with you today

as we take another step forward on this grand voyage through the scriptures.

It's a special day in that we're making transitions in Old and New Testaments simultaneously.

So we'll go into the Book of Lamentations in the Old Testament,

and then the letter, a personal letter from the Apostle Paul,

to a man named Philemon in the New Testament,

and we'll read that entire letter when we get there.

But we're going into lamentations now, and so let's talk about that for just a second before

we begin, because it's like a different kind of territory.

We have been in mournful territory,

and we have been in trauma,

through all of the stories of exile,

and particularly, especially in the book of Job,

like we have dealt with pain,

emotional suffering, complex trauma, the kinds of things that we just cannot give answers for.

Lamentations is mourn full territory.

It is a book that is composed of five poems, all poems of laments, that are geared toward the fall

and destruction of Jerusalem. But if we zoom out, there are poems of fall and destruction and pain,

...