Over the last couple of weeks I’ve journeyed the path of burden-bearing, utter desperation for God, and worshiping Him alongside lament, frustration and even anger, if I’m being honest, at the suffering of my friends. I’ve been hesitant to polish up the thoughts of my journaling and journeying and place them here, like I typically do (even though I wouldn’t truly call this blog “polished”!), because I’m about to say that lament is a good thing, even a necessary thing. We rarely see lament as a good thing – as something to be talked about. We want to flee, or fix, or hide when the tears turn on and the questions start being asked that have no answer. But the truth is, we all, even this week, have experienced the sting of brokenness, life, death, limitations, or affliction in some capacity, and probably need to face it.
If you’re around our church at all, you’ve felt this sting communally over the last couple of weeks in gut-wrenching ways. What we do with this is the looming question, even if you don’t dare to ask it aloud. How do we walk out the tension of simply joys and laughter alongside heart breaking news and unanswered questions?
In my crying out to God, weeping, and burden bearing for my friends and congregation, I’ve come again to the purity that is in desperation, the worship that is in lament, and the sweetness of the Lord that is only tasted amidst affliction.
Here’s where the Psalms come in. They are full of honesty and reality; beauty and pain; worship and lament. They give words to our hearts, because I think, if we’re honest, we avoid grieving and loss at all costs. We avoid our limitations and fears. And yet, David teaches his people to lament, and even tells them to learn how to lament well in 2 Samuel 1. What is it in us that wants to hide from it? In regard to this, Eugene Peterson exhorts us:
“Pain isn’t the worst thing. Being hated is the worst thing. Being separated from the one you love isn’t the worst thing. Death isn’t the worst thing. The worst thing is failing to deal with reality and becoming disconnected from what is actual. The worst thing is trivializing the honorable, desecrating the sacred. What I do with my grief affects the way you handle your grief; together we form a community that deals with death and loss in the context of God’s sovereignty, which is expressed finally in the resurrection….We don’t become mature human beings by getting lucky or circumventing loss, and certainly not by avoidance and distraction. Learn to lament. We’re mortals after all…Take up your cross. It prepares us and those around us for resurrection.” (Leap Over a Wall, but I read it here: Emotionally Healthy Spirituality: Day by Day)
I long more for heaven for myself and those around me as I desperately cry for God to heal even here on earth. When I’m desperate, Jesus does this purifying work in me and those around me, when I persist in prayer…again and again…and with others! He purifies my desires and reminds me that this isn’t all there is, and yet, He cares immensely about the physical as well as the spiritual – He did weep for his friends and raise Lazarus, after all.
There is a work God can do only in the desperation and only in the loneliness it may bring. I long for my friends and pray for my friends, but I cannot do a work in them like the Holy Spirit can. I am burdened for the Lord to work, heal, and meet them right where they are. For His power and presence and goodness to be felt and tasted. I am burdened; and yet, I don’t shoulder it alone. And God works in me as I am burdened for others and myself. A deeper work. A work we didn’t ask for but we need. A work that is done as we see and say: God is good; no matter what. And as we say that, we let our lament become worship and we mysteriously taste and see that the Lord is good in new and deeper ways. He will do more than all we ask or imagine.
I pray you worship Him in your lament, and not apart from it; to feel the sting of pain, and yet feel a deeper comfort that the Lord promises to bring; to know that God is only ever good, and is ultimately The Victorious One.
