Week 835 · about 45 minutes
Lamentations 2
Lamentations 2 · Memory verse Lamentations 2:19
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Queues the lesson plan, this story’s coloring page (Lamentations 2), the matching word search and answer key (Lamentations 2 word search), the memory-verse tracer, and a parent slip.
Five-minute object lesson
Prop: a piece of bread
Hold a piece of bread. Read Lamentations 2 in about four minutes, stopping at Lamentations 2:19: “Arise, cry out in the night, at the beginning of the watches! Pour out your heart like water before the face of the Lord. Lift up your hands toward him for the life of your young children, who faint for hunger at the head of every street.” Ask, “What does this prop have to do with Lamentations 2?” Let two children answer, then say the memory verse together.
Story script
Lamentations 2 is a real chapter from the Old Testament. It starts, “How has the Lord covered the daughter of Zion with a cloud in his anger! He has cast the beauty of Israel down from heaven to the earth, and hasn’t remembered his footstool in the day of his anger.” That is not a motto invented for a poster. It is the first sentence a family hears when this page is opened at night.
Keep going a little further. The chapter also says, “They ask their mothers, “Where is grain and wine?” when they swoon as the wounded in the streets of the city, when their soul is poured out into their mothers’ bosom.” Lamentations 2 opens with these words: “How has the Lord covered the daughter of Zion with a cloud in his anger! He has cast the beauty of Israel down from heaven to the earth,…” The line to keep is Lamentations 2:19: “Arise, cry out in the night, at the beginning of the watches! Pour out your heart like water before the face of the Lord. Lift up your hands toward him for…” Carry the word “arise” from that verse into the rest of the day.
The line worth learning out loud is Lamentations 2:19: “Arise, cry out in the night, at the beginning of the watches! Pour out your heart like water before the face of the Lord. Lift up your hands toward him for the life of your young children, who faint for hunger at the head of every street.” If the rest of the chapter feels crowded, hold that one sentence until the room is quiet.
What happens first in Lamentations 2? Then try this: Read “Arise, cry out in the night, at the beginning of the watches! Pour out your heart like water before the face…” once more. What does it show you about God? You do not have to finish every verse. You can close the book after the memory verse and still have read the Bible together.
Group game
Walk the room as if you are moving through Lamentations 2. Every time you freeze, a child says one word from Lamentations 2:19. The last child says the whole verse.
Craft
On a US Letter sheet, draw one picture from Lamentations 2 and write Lamentations 2:19 under it. Send it home as tonight’s reminder, not as a decoration contest.
Memory verse
Lamentations 2:19
“Arise, cry out in the night, at the beginning of the watches! Pour out your heart like water before the face of the Lord. Lift up your hands toward him for the life of your young children, who faint for hunger at the head of every street.”
Take-home prayer
Father, thank you for Lamentations 2. Help us remember Lamentations 2:19 when we wake up, and teach us to notice you in an ordinary night. Amen.