Lamentations 3:51
“My eye affects my soul, because of all the daughters of my city.”
What does Lamentations 3:51 mean?
The speaker is overwhelmed by witnessing the suffering of the women in Jerusalem—a city under siege and destruction. His grief is so deep that simply seeing their pain (the "daughters of my city") wounds his own soul; he can't separate what he's watching from what he's feeling inside. This captures something true about compassion: when we genuinely care about people, their hardship becomes our hardship too, and we carry that weight with us.