The City That Forgot How to Dance

In 2013, Detroit filed for bankruptcy — the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history. But the numbers only told part of the story. Drive down Brush Street, past the Packard Plant, and you saw it: a cathedral of industry, once employing 40,000 workers, now a hollow skeleton of broken glass and creeping vines. Neighborhoods that had hummed with block parties and church suppers stood empty, whole streets where only two or three houses still had lights on at night. The population had plummeted from 1.8 million to barely 700,000. Friends and neighbors had packed U-Hauls and left without looking back.

The old-timers remembered something different. They remembered Motown, the auto boom, Friday nights when the streets pulsed with music and possibility. They remembered when Detroit meant something — when the whole world looked at their city with admiration.

That ache is the sound of Lamentations. "How deserted lies the city, once so full of people." Jeremiah watched Jerusalem — once the crown jewel of nations, the place where God's presence dwelled — sit empty and grieving like a widow at a kitchen table, turning over photographs of what used to be. Her allies abandoned her. Her streets, once packed with pilgrims heading to the temple festivals, gathered dust.

Yet the prophet did not look away. He sat in the ruins and named the grief. Sometimes faithfulness begins not with rebuilding, but with refusing to pretend the loss isn't real — and trusting that the God who heard Israel's weeping in Egypt still hears us in our desolation.