Pneuma is a journal on spiritual direction and formation in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada . Jesus engages in lament, which is a yearning before God for some other reality than the one in which you find yourself, an accusing and a convicting of the Holy for not being quite powerful enough to overcome the gap between the image and reality. Jesus is about to negotiate that narrow passageway of death with no promise to come to the other side, and his lament is at once a statement about himself and about Jerusalem. On the one hand, the lament for Jerusalem is that they didn't know what they had when they had it, and they won't have this opportunity again. On the other hand, the lament implicates Jesus because he was unable to communicate fully the nature and purpose of his mission so that more people would have seen it and followed.
Prayer is a way to remember the future.
When all you have left is prayer, one way to pray is to remember a future you once glimpsed, a future in which the resolution to all the senses of incompleteness you carry in your heart will come to pass. The future will be remembered as a time for wholeness, where the loose ends are tied up, not here of course but on a grander scheme than my puny mind can envision. In some way, what you might have become in any given place is revealed to you, not to taunt you but so that you may know that it all could have happened if things had been different, and the feeling that will come with such prayer is one of rest and quiet, a sense of fulfilment even in the midst of all the inconclusiveness. This kind of prayer allows us to see the promises of God written on the end of time through the power of the resurrection, and then to project those promises back from God's future to our time. Second, prayer is a way to hope in the past.