(Still) Learning to Lament

It was an ordinary Tuesday. As I rushed into the choir room just ahead of the bell, I remember seeing her older brother pacing outside the school office, waiting for her to be released from class. My childhood friend’s mother had died after a long illness when we were seniors in high school. 

I knew her mother was sick but my world was spinning in a regular orbit, so I had never mentioned it. For years, I pretended not to notice her mother’s decline when I spent the night enjoying her dad’s culinary expertise, when I hung out in their upstairs TV room after school, or when I tagged along on their family vacations.

When I heard the news of her mother’s passing, I didn’t go to my friend’s familiar house to console her. Her pain was something I couldn’t understand and didn’t want to see up close. Truth is, I felt a new kind of fearful sadness of my own that I didn’t know how to express. So, I ignored it. I attended the funeral but pretty much expected everything to be back to baseline soon afterward. I’m not sure I ever talked about her mother’s death to anyone, especially God, who had apparently dropped the ball. My friend and I tried to continue our normal teenage lives. Later that year, we graduated and went our separate ways. Before Facebook and at the height of long distance charges, we drifted apart. I put my God and my friend in a box marked “high school” and didn’t take either one out for years.

I often wonder if it really was distance and decisions that came between us. I wonder how my relationship with God, and my friend, might have been different if I had expressed the unfamiliar disappointment, anger, disillusionment, fear. 

Right now, many of us are hurting in new ways, too. And most of us are not articulating it. So, as hard as we try to hold it together, grief is seeping out in small drips and large downpours. It catches us off-guard and spills over onto unsuspecting family members, Facebook friends, Zoom conference attendees, and real-life bystanders. God understands, and He wants us to talk about it. God wants us to lament.

WHAT IS LAMENT?

Lament is a passionate expression of grief or sorrow. It is more than just feeling the heartache. It is openly admitting to God the intense, confusing pain.

As humans we suffer, but only as believers do we lament. And it is uniquely difficult because of the closeness of our God. We know His promises and we know Him. Yet, we live here in a world of sorrows, just as all His followers live, after the ascension and before His return. We live between promises. And so, with feet in both worlds, a lament feels messy. We believe but we hurt, we know but we question.

As humans we suffer, but only as believers do we lament.

Russ Ramsey in his book Struck describes lament as “a complaint bound to faith, confusion bound to trust, petition bound to allegiance.” For the believer, grief seldom stands alone. It takes on a deeper dimension. A harsh reality hurts more coming from Someone we love and trust. In lament, betrayal mixes in with the grief.

From my journal nine months in, and some days it seems even more true after 11 years:

Nine months into this heart failure journey I’m wondering when God is going to step in. I am giving him all the glory for holding this thing together so far. I know I should have never lived this long in my condition, but now it seems like a logical next step with me on so many prayer lists to heal me and be done with it. I have learned to rely on him and now it’s time to display his love and power. We are getting nowhere. No measurable improvement despite all the meds and all the interventions. When I vowed to never need the internal defibrillator, I was sure I was just claiming an early victory for God. Now it’s scheduled to happen. I don’t get it. Why not heal me, God?  Why not demonstrate your majesty? Why not move while people are watching? My healing after thousands of prayers and tons of faithful surrender seems to make perfect sense. I’m starting to feel duped or deserted—not sure which.

DIFFERENT FROM COMPLAINT

At first, a lament can feel like we’re complaining. But there are two ways lament differs from complaint.

First, a complaint is assuming the worst about God’s character. It is the Israelites grumbling in the desert in Exodus 16:3  saying things like, “He wants ‘to starve the entire assembly to death.’” Lament, on the other hand, is an appeal to God based on His good character. It is David in Psalm 22 crying out to God, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (v. 1) He knows it makes no sense, recalling in verses 4 and 5 that “In you our ancestors put their trust; they trusted and you delivered them. To you they cried out and were saved; in you they trusted and were not put to shame.”

A complaint is assuming the worst about God’s character. Lament, on the other hand, is an appeal to God based on His good character.

Another big way lament is distinguishable from complaint is that, in complaint (as in the Exodus example above), we talk about the one we have an issue with, where in lament we talk to the one we have an issue with. Much like gossip, a complaint doesn’t go directly to the source, whereas lament goes straight to God.

WE’RE IN GOOD COMPANY

Both David, the man after God’s own heart, and Jesus, the man who embodied God’s own heart, were familiar with laments. Each cried out to God when his belief didn’t seem to match his experience.

David, dismissed, hunted, and rejected, penned nearly half of the Psalms, and one third of those are laments: How long? Why? Where are You?

Jesus pleaded for answers in Gethsemane with the impending crucifixion, “Let this cup pass.” And at Golgotha in the middle of it, “Why have You forsaken Me?”

His followers feel it recently with the weight of racial injustice, economic woes, ongoing wars, health crises, wayward children, lost jobs. Expressing our pain can sometimes feel disloyal, like we are giving up on God’s ultimate goodness. Or maybe more like He’s giving up on us. But God intended it for something much different.

LAMENT DEMONSTRATES BELIEF

Lament shows belief like few other expressions can. In fact, it may be one of the truest forms of praise. Lament reaches out for God when logic urges us to run away. Mark Vroegop says,

“The practice of lament is one of the most theologically informed things a person can do.” 

– Mark Vroegop

   

Some of the most heart-felt places in scripture are rich in lament. Psalms, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, all focus on hurt and expressing it. They range from personal pain to shared suffering, and almost always end with a statement of confidence in the goodness of God, in praise. When we lament, we sift the truth out of difficult feelings and harsh realities.

Though deep in the mire, a lament can feel like we are abandoning our faith, it’s actually just the opposite. Lament announces that even though we don’t like what’s happening, we’re choosing to trust. When we lament, we are re-upping our belief in this God we often don’t understand:

• I believe You exist. Just as I wouldn’t send an email or make a phone call to someone I didn’t believe was real, by communicating to You I’m confirming that I know You are there.
• I believe You are powerful. I can’t hold someone accountable unless I believe they had power over the result. The fact that I am bringing this to You means I know You could have done something about it. And that You can bring about a different result in the future. 
• I believe You love me. By sharing my deep personal feelings with You, I affirm that You are a caring listener. Otherwise, I’d keep the thoughts to myself. I hurt because I know You love me and I can’t humanly reconcile that love with my current reality.

LAMENT MAKES ROOM FOR GOD

Rather than suffocating it with silence, lament breathes life into our relationship with Him so no struggle is off limits. Passionate communication creates room for God, especially in our heartbreak. When we can be honest about our deepest pain, we allow Him in.

Centuries ago, William Arnot expressed that “entering in” using these timeless words:

“When I weep, Christ enters by the openings which grief has made into my heart, and gently makes it all his own.”

-William Arnot

It took years of living to discover how God enters into our suffering and points it all back to Himself. 

Whatever we’re lamenting today—and we all are passionately grieving something in this remodeled world—we shouldn’t be afraid to bring God into it. It’s the only way He can work within it, and within us. One day when we’ve walked further on this sidewalk, we will realize even these losses were meant for more than we know. 

When my father passed away, this faraway friend sensed how I was grieving. Still living in the small town where we grew up, she reached out to offer her help to my mother. I know my friend understands this pain, and I see her decades-old hurt being used for good. 

I just wish I had learned to lament all those years ago…when my friend, and my faith, both needed it.

(A version of this article first appeared in the Summer 2021 print edition of Just Between Us Magazine.)

***Listen to this post read by the author HERE.***