The Strength of Lament
We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.
DIETRICH BONHOEFFER
Before I considered myself a Christian, my life was littered with lost things. I’d raised angry fists at God and wondered how Christians could speak of his loving-kindness when all around me I saw devastation. But after I became a Christian, I automatically withheld my weak and broken places from God. I began to instinctively tidy myself up. Fix yourself for Jesus was never the good news, but so many of us default to this. Sure, brokenness made sense for non-Christians; they didn’t have the hope I did. But after I became a Christian, I slipped into a relationship with the same reliable and safe God who offered no solace for my parents. The God who can be managed with more prayer, and more faith, and more Bible study and Scripture memorization. A God I didn’t have to fear. A God I could understand but not know. But in order for any of that to make sense, I had to believe that the only thing that mattered was eternity. Some far-off hope where things would be made right, but no answers for the moments in between. No hope to remain in the middle space where many of us live our days—our whisper of “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief,” dangling from our trembling lips. I’d been taught doubt was the sin that would undo me and send me back to the darkness before God. I came to believe faith was never entertaining doubt and its demonic mothers, sorrow and suffering—the dragging underbelly that birthed doubt. I never entertained that eternal question: Is God good? Faith meant silencing the questions, sentencing them to the furthest corners of my mind where I’d keep guard against them.
I didn’t know then that sorrow is sacramental. Sorrow is sacred. Suffering is not an indictment against God; it can be the single space we identify most deeply with Christ, who knows it best.
I had been a Christian for years; I knew the lingo. Everything happens for a reason. God works all things for good. Instead of a dark underbelly, there was a silver lining. I faulted myself for not seeing past the storm clouds; I wasn’t trying hard enough to choose joy. So often church teaches us to hide our true selves, to cover up our anguish, our rage, our brokenhearted longing for a better story.
Believers claim verses about hope and joy and standing firm in our faith. We flip to Romans 8:28 and slap it onto every painful occasion, every trial, every sorrow. We want to skip ahead to the good things, instead of coming as empty and battered as we truly are, offering nothing, and believing that Jesus will see us every time. We’re uncomfortable to stand before a crowd of witnesses and fall at Jesus’s feet while everyone sidesteps our desperation and judges its inappropriateness. Being poor, or broken, or needy is something we fight against. We have taught a tidy life of carefully chosen roads and avoidable obstacles. But the reality of following Christ is that there is nothing tidy about it.
Christians lie when we sell a packaged and sanitary way of following God. We offer a discounted gospel when we say it will fix your problems, ease out the wrinkles of your day, give you shiny, full-bodied hair and perfectly behaved children. We wield our Christianity like an omen to ward off hard times. We want a warning sign or someone to blame when things get broken. When children die. When dreams fail. When we are summoned to great and immeasurable loss and the hits keep coming.
A Devastating Grief
I awoke hours before the alarm clock went off. I curled on my side and placed a hand on my swollen belly, hollowed and echoing a raging emptiness.
I showered that morning, letting the hot water run down my face, mingling with tears. My eyes were puffy, the whites traversed with spidery red lines. My ragged, wet hair dripped onto my bare shoulders like I was being pulled down and drowned by the weight of my pain.
The week before, we sat, anticipating another heartbeat. But the thud was missing when my doctor rubbed warm jelly onto the ultrasound wand and waved it over my belly. Like a magician saying abracadabra, the screen came to life, a whoosh of static and a faint, immovable outline. His hand slowed. He furrowed his brow then and called me “kiddo” as he explained how things had gone so wrong. How there should be movement and a fetal heartbeat, how the silhouette of my baby was not a magic trick, it was a disappearing act. An apparition, a loss, how the flutters I felt were never going to get stronger.
We drove to the hospital in silence. There weren’t any words worth saying.
The doctor explained everything again while Josh rubbed my hand, churning it in his as if wearing smooth a prayer bead.
I signed papers and undressed. I put on a hospital gown and removed my wedding ring, handing it to Josh. He helped me climb awkwardly into the bed with the railings locking into place like a trap. And I laid my arms open, offering my veins for the start of an IV. I counted the tiles in the ceiling as they wheeled me under the fluorescent lights, clearing my mind out by filling it with nothing.
There was a rush of people in and out, a swish of hospital scrubs and stethoscopes and the ragged rip of the blood pressure cuff. The thud of my heart pumped in my ears.
It astonished me that my heart could just keep pumping when it had already broken.
I was asked the same questions over and over as the shifts changed and my bed was wheeled into pre-op and post-op. They asked me to state my name and birthday and what I was being treated for as they checked my chart and lifted my arm to match it to my paper wristband.
My voice was even, a monotone recitation. I was there for a D&C. A little over sixteen weeks. Alia, and twenty-two years old. And then I would add miscarriage just in case. So they would know the baby they were taking from me was already gone. My body had failed me again.
I awoke groggy, my throat sore and raspy, my IV tubing falling across my face as I wiped at my eyes, waking to a new reality. And later, when I was discharged, I pulled on my stretchy pants, belly still swollen but hollow all the same, and shuffled out of the hospital.
Saying All the Right God Things
I wouldn’t ask questions like why out loud. When Josh and I lost our baby, I thought faith was saying God works all things for good and leaving it at that. Well-meaning people told me God needed another angel. They told me God has a purpose for everything. They told me other people had it worse, at least I had a healthy kid. They told me I was young and could try again.
I’d seen others live a life devoted to their grief. But I feared that conceding to the pain and asking hard questions belied a small faith, not enough trust in the sovereignty of God, and too much focus on the here and now. I believed eternity was what mattered, and getting there had less to do with flourishing here than it did a blind devotion and total white-flag surrender to whatever came my way.
Secretly, I worried God might not have the answers to my questions, so I summed up life in Bible verses, in parables and tidy lessons, hoping to absolve God for the suffering and loss I felt. I wanted a shortcut to bypass the pain. I wasn’t sure my God could stand up to the scrutiny if I let loose all my doubts.
So I learned to fear the unknowns, the emptiness, the messiness of life and indeed death. I feared faith. I wanted certainty and promises I could control. I wanted a God I could contain within the highlighted portions of my study Bible, not one who met me in operating rooms filled with death.
But grief pushed down comes out sideways. It’s taken me years to learn to adequately grieve lost things.
I wish I had known that sometimes this life will ache with emptiness and it’s okay not to rush to fill it. It’s okay to leave some questions on the books. It’s okay to be angry and to admit we can’t see the good of it all right now. To sit on the floor in my baby’s room and weep over the blankets and the onesies and the car seat that would be packed back up.
It’s okay to grieve the lost things you held only as the flutters of hopes and dreams. It’s still loss. How else do we make peace with the present?
I wish someone had told me it was okay to relent to sadness, to doubt, to the divine ache and the catastrophe that is death. We can lie on a gurney with God and allow the sorrow and suffering its due. We let God reckon with death, and we acknowledge that things are not as they should be and we are not the only ones offended by the tragedy coming for us all. I wish someone had told me it was okay to succumb to anger, to the great and formidable why? I wish I had understood that God is undaunted by my humanity.
I wish I had understood that answers are not the reason we ask the questions. Sometimes we ask the questions to say, Who are you really, God? Who are you to me right now in this pain? Where are you now? Are you here with me now? Can I trust you’re not relegated to some distant eternity, sitting on a silver-lined cloud, but instead in this sterile and silent room? The questions are the place to admit our need, not just for answers, but for awareness of who God is.
I wish I had known the questions are the invitation for Jesus to enter our sorrow and reclaim the dead space.
I wish I had known Jesus is the God of all lost things.
We live in a world of fractured dignity. We rise each morning to the lament of a sin-scarred existence. We see it in the headlines, in the cracks and fissures and gaping wounds of the church, and if we’re honest, in the mirror as we gaze in wide-eyed horror at how easily our hearts wander and break. And sometimes every solution is a Band-Aid on a hemorrhaging wound, because our solutions often try to sidestep the reality that this world hurts. This world is filled to the brim with lost things. We’ve all had death etched on our bones.
Surprised by Suffering
So often, we’re surprised by injury and inconvenience, by suffering and circumstances. We’ve reduced our gospel down to a formulaic set of rules whereby the faithful sidestep the pitfalls of this fallen world and instead float unscathed and isolated through their good life. We want it all and forget there is always a cost. As C. S. Lewis so eloquently implies, we want safe instead of good.
If we fail to dig into a theology of suffering and the way we as Christ followers will hurt right alongside a troubled world, we write off people’s trials as an anomaly or a reaping they had coming instead of a place we connect with God’s solace and peace and even our purpose in walking with and weeping with those who weep.
We love to make excuses and write off pain as a lack of faith and offer remedies and platitudes and never push in deeper to community to help carry a burden stretched wide and intended for the whole church to bear.
We are a culture with no room for awkward tears and pain that can’t be fixed. We hide our shame when we are not enough, when we are weak, when we are anxious and burdened, when we don’t have the answers. What does the gospel offer us in this pain if we cannot be people who grieve even as we believe? Where is the God who resides in cancer wards, war zones, grave sites, and gutters?
Let us pour out the oil of gladness and praise from our lips but let us not forget the wails and cries and pounding fists. God is here too.
You Can’t Talk to God Like That
I remember reading the book of Ruth as a new Christian, and I came to the verse where Naomi says, “The LORD’s hand has turned against me” (1:13 NIV). I thought, You can’t talk to God like that. It seemed blasphemous somehow. Shouldn’t she have been a stronger believer who trusted God even in the face of such loss? Especially since her daughter-in-law was watching her relationship with God. Isn’t Naomi being a bad witness? Wouldn’t it have been a more powerful story if she was widowed and lost both of her sons and was a destitute foreigner, but she told Ruth not to worry because God was faithful and would provide for them? Wouldn’t the steadfast thing have been to tell Ruth that God is good and they had nothing to worry about?
I didn’t understand it then, but years later, when I had endured a different measure of grief, loss, and suffering, I saw something different. I saw a woman who didn’t stop praying even when her words were bitter. I saw a woman who still calls God Yahweh, admitting that he is constant, the great “I Am.” Naomi remains in covenant with Yahweh and travels back to Bethlehem. She acts in faith even though her heart is broken and frustrated. She is achingly honest about her emptiness and need. God wanted her lament to bind her to him.
The Ministry of Burden Bearing
So often we’ve been trained to have all the right answers and be ready with a verse, or a quote, or an uplifting anecdote that we forget that sometimes the ministry of burden bearing goes further than advice we toss out from a distance and instead means some heavy lifting.
Are we people who bear one another’s burdens well? Or do we spend most of our time trying to convince them that it couldn’t possibly be that heavy or that they don’t have that much further to carry it?
Sometimes I wonder if all our pep talks are really more to insulate ourselves from the reality that sometimes we have no answers for suffering. We are like Job’s meddlesome friends, inaccurately pointing our fingers this way and that, trying to pin it on someone. We trust that nothing is lost that is surrendered to him because he is a God of constant redemption, but that doesn’t make those ashen places or empty wombs any less awful.
Could we be people who confess our great and unending need to one another and be met with Jesus? Could we be a church where doubt and dependence are welcome to be explored together?
If we believed that God can and does call us to a life reliant solely on him, would we not also believe he calls us to a life relying on each other? I often think of Jesus’s life, and how he chose dependence for himself. He chose to rely on a young unwed mother to protect and defend him, to later wake with his swaddled infant body and put him to her breast all hours of the day and night. He trusted his sustenance would come through the nourishment of another. He relied on his disciples and the generosity of sinners to help meet his physical needs. His entire life on earth, Jesus chose to insert himself into humanity and risk being denied, risk being betrayed, risk being misunderstood, risk being lonely, risk being judged and ridiculed and eventually killed. Jesus took on flesh, and we have this vague concept what that means. But for him to model this dependence, this fleshly weakness, for God to have scars means the world got close enough to leave its marks. It means he was vulnerable and open and dependent enough to fully invest in people even when he knew the outcome would cost him. As the body of Christ, are we not one flesh who mourns and rejoices as one? Why are we so bad at belonging to each other?
We like to talk about how God works all things for good, especially when it’s not our circumstances that are a mess. Don’t get me wrong, these things are all true, as God’s Word says, but it’s just human nature to want to shine things up when someone close to us is expressing doubt, or loss, or grief. It doesn’t mean we have bad intentions or that we’re hurtful people—sometimes we honestly think we’re helping.
But as someone who has been on the receiving end of a lot of “let go and let God” and “sometimes God shuts a door and opens a window” pep talks, it can feel reductive. Especially if that’s all we’re ever hearing from God’s people.
We are taught to tamp down any arguments and to consider outrage, anger, and doubt crude and unnecessary for kingdom work. Truth becomes a pinnable quote or a pretty printable, but it doesn’t have a way to deal with the horror of grief or the absolute shock of suffering. It has no answers for evil, racism, violence, injustice, or oppression. It cannot sustain confrontation and is lulled by inside voices and the need for everyone not only to get along but to agree. It cannot sustain doubt. It has no answer for the marginalized, the poor, or the pitiable. Injustice is something God will fix later but we don’t get our hands messy now.
Learning to Lament
What if instead we were a people who learned to lament? What if we believed faith was less about blind devotion to all the right answers and more of an invitation to come fully into relationship with Christ and be met in our most desperate and confusing moments? Lament isn’t some patch slapped onto hard times to make them more palatable but an admission of our profound weakness and inability to carry a single thing on our own.
Lament isn’t simply about feeling pain. It is a cry of injustice; it is the piercing howl of protest against evil; it is confession and petition, and even praise. It screams that death has wronged us, but it will not have the final say. When we ask God why he has forsaken us, it is the language of intimacy that trusts our agony will be heard and answered. If my suffering has taught me anything, it is just how bold I can be with God in my distress.
God does not expect us to remain stoic when our hearts are rent. We are not asked to put our masks back on so we don’t embarrass God with our suffering. We are not better Christians when we call the hardest parts of life “good.” But we can learn to call God good in the hardest parts of our lives. Admittedly, understanding love was easier before grief touched me. It remained buoyant, intact, simple. Floating on lofty ideas about loving thy neighbor or thine enemy. The after cost more. Love overtook me with weight and fullness, impregnated with possibility, I dare say hope, but bleeding from its palms.
Jesus Isn’t Afraid of Our Humanity
Jesus paid attention. Jesus wept. Jesus broke bread and laughed with his friends and healed the sick. He tucked himself away to rest and pray. He went to parties and took naps. He walked this earth in a body that could easily be broken. He said come unto me. And in so doing, he royally ticked off a lot of people who despised how common he made grace. But Jesus knew how to read the room. When we look at Scripture, we see Jesus offered comfort, presence, and mercy, but he also met people’s needs right where they were. He fed them and healed them and served them. He gave them water, washed their feet, and helped them fish. Jesus didn’t fear the fleshiness of our existence, our frailty or our failings. He came near, God with us. As Christ followers, we must be willing to practice the art of nearness. Of with-ness. There are a myriad of human emotions that are difficult to sit with, to engage, to carry. During a tender and wearying time, it’s often easier to promise someone the happy ending than to accompany them on each agonizing step in their long walk of obedience.
Lament says you belong to me, and I belong to you and will enter in with you. It is Ruth linking arms with Naomi and vowing, “Your God will be my God and we’ll make the journey home together.”
Jesus knew what it was to endure someone’s anguish. He knew what it was to see people, to lock eyes on our desperation, to not turn from our sorrow, our despair, or our weakness. He was never offended by our humanity; he chose it for himself when he walked among us.
So often when we are hurting in church, we put our masks back on and pretend everything is fine because we think our testimony is supposed to be our faithfulness. But our testimony is only ever how God is faithful to us, not the other way around. When we try to keep up the pretense for too long, we grow further away from God. To stay in relationship with God, when our worlds turn upside down and nothing makes sense, he invites us to lament. How amazing that a sovereign God is not offended by our big feelings. How amazing that he comes near.
How Long, O Lord?
When we are bewildered by our distant, unseeable God, we don’t turn away; we live into the tension that even though we are afflicted and feeling forsaken, our gracious and merciful God is still our God. It dismembers our doubt, because we can honestly express it. Like the psalmist, we can cry out, “How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?” (Ps. 13:1–2).
These days bipolar disorder and physical illness have claimed so much. I mourn the lost things, my life soiled by invisible sackcloth and ashes. I tear at my clothes, collapse into a heap, and allow my heart to wail unrestrained by the confines of social norms and polite company. I am a madwoman, beating at my breast, lamenting the suffering of a mind so broken it feels like a thousand stinging pests let loose in my hair.
I tell God I cannot endure this. I ask him to take this cup. I beg for mercy. I confess I need help to believe once again. I carry these things clumsily, my mind falters so easily and some days all I have on my lips are the Psalms to ask, Why God? Just the questions and the assurance that he knows even when I don’t. Just the prayers of a million needs and aches and the swirl of tragedy that dusts our ashen world.
But sometimes in the midst of those prayers, I feel a glimpse of kingdom glory and the kind of love that makes no sense and the kind of brave that inhabits the hearts of humanity when God is in us. I feel a tenacious grip of hope wrestling its way through the despair, and what comes out is praise. That native tongue swelling with the language of God’s people. Hope. Can you imagine this? This praise. In the face of the absurd and horrific and terrifying. Because after lament, I am always found again in him. All who belong to him will never be lost. I know this as surely as I know anything.
In lament, we find language that boldly comes before God and trusts him to show his face. To cover us and guide us and ransom us. To fight our enemies and restore the barren places. In lament, we acknowledge we are powerless to fix it. The good news is God never asked us to. We cry out from blood-soaked asphalt and hospital beds, from grave sites and war zones where artillery shells have punctured so much more than the rubble at our feet. We cry out over empty cribs and jail cells, from protest lines and church pews. We cry out after biopsy results and making the side of a bed that will never be slept in again.
Lament is subversive, always lifting from the breasts of the suffering; it’s always born in pain. Our tongues swollen with agony. It is the untamed cry of our hearts. The truth of our witness.
We are not called to housebreak this truth or make it more palatable by neutering it and making it play nice and behave. The truth will not sit and fetch and stay, it demands to be unleashed. It is wild and dangerous. So often we’ve made an idol of image and the status quo. Sometimes the church is so busy scurrying around trying to protect our testimonies that we’ve failed to bear witness to a broken world because the truth is too ferocious.
Sometimes I sit in the dark with a silent God, in the death of dreams, and the disaster of middle spaces, and I say, this tenderness, this holy ache, this wailing sorrow? This is not our great liability. This is our gift, the costliest one we’ll ever carry. Unwrapped, it’s opening to another’s pain. Offering in return our burdened broken hearts as a reservoir for corporate lament. It demands divine strength. Eternity keeps account. No tear is lost. We carry them together.
How then do we speak truth to power, breaking down wrong things, while building bridges to connect us? How do we become truth tellers living into our purpose? How do we have honest conversations with God and about God?
The peacekeepers live in an opaque world where no truth can penetrate. They’re so insulated, they don’t recognize their own great isolation. They’ve stockpiled a bill of goods for the long haul and taken care of their own. They say, “Peace, peace,” where there is no peace. They’ve built great walls to protect themselves. They say unity when they mean uniformity. They say “settle down” and “anger is a sin.” They say “fix your eyes on eternity” as they blindly watch the borders grow taller. They numb their weakness, they deny grace, because, “Haven’t we done just fine for ourselves? Aren’t we #blessed in this great kingdom we’ve built?” They dismiss the faint sound of wails and protest beyond the great walls they’ve built around their safety and comfort.
The cynics live in a transparent world where they shine a glaring light on and call out everything and it is garish and harsh, exposed and raw. They are crusaders, ransacking houses, so busy dragging everyone into the street to be tried and stoned. They’d summon hellfire from the heavens if they could, to scorch the earth and all its inhabitants, without remembering they’d be eaten by the flames too. They scream and point fingers and accuse, composing vicious tweets dripping with their own enlightenment, but their hands are so full of stones to throw, they have no way to welcome anyone. They haven’t learned how love covers a multitude of sins. Their devotion to destroying leaves everyone bare, cold, and naked.
But the people of God are called to be peacemakers. We see the beauty and the brokenness. We face the world sober. We aren’t passive in the face of suffering, oppression, or injustice. We listen to the cries, we echo them in our hearts. We get our hands dirty, not with stones to throw at others, but with the rebuilding of the kingdom. We remember we are counted among those needing grace—we are the ones who would get scorched by the fire or drowned by the flood if not for the mercy of God. We have earned nothing. We know grace, because the light found us. We are translucent, shining the glory of God in a world gone dark, even in the dark places of our own lives. We have access to God. He hears our cries.