When I reached my dark night of the soul and the world and my faith as I knew it fell apart, I had to leave church. It was a close-knit church that I had grown up in for close to twenty years. You name it and I had been involved. My family of origin still is. So it took a cataclysmic crisis in my life to rip me away from a place that had long been a sense of home and belonging and security. It’s been nine years, and I still haven’t been back. I’ve worked my way tentatively into another church in another town, with mixed internal success. But I still can’t go back to that first church, even to visit. If I’m brutally honest, I still have a minor panic attack if I drive into the parking lot, even though it has a new pastor and a new name. There are a lot of complex reasons for this, and I won’t try to explain them in this post. But one of the broader reasons why I left is that I needed space to lament.

Church, and the culture that goes with it, often leave little to no room for lament. I say this about the church I grew up in, but also just as a general observation about protestant churches in general. I can’t speak for other strains of denominations I haven’t fully experienced, but my general intuition is that people who are deeply suffering have a hard time showing up at a place of worship. I am in no way wanting to judge the intentions of the people in my congregation at that time. But I can speak to my experience, and it felt like I had to leave church in order to grieve and be a mess because my grief and mess seemed to make others uncomfortable. They didn’t know what to do with me. Some sadness might be allowed, but then it needed to be hurried up and gotten over. Jesus fixes everything after all. He is the answer. He makes our world something to rejoice is. So what are you doing over there bawling your eyes out in misery in the back corner? After the third week in a row of leaving church at the soonest moment possible to walk home and sit on my porch and wail from my gut, I decided I didn’t have the endurance to keep facing it. I needed space. Unfiltered space to go on a messy journey.

Sarah Bessey writes, “Only our most overzealous preached it, but it was an unwritten expectation that ran through a lot of our theology: Don’t give in to the darkness, don’t name it, don’t give it power, don’t acknowledge it, don’t confess it, don’t be sad, don’t be mad, don’t be despairing, don’t pay attention to the monster crouching in the corner. We believed that our feelings and circumstances had to obey our carefully curated version of the Word of God: we are more than overcomers; the joy of the Lord is our strength; death has no sting. So don’t grieve when death comes calling: They are now with Jesus. Don’t be sick: Come down with a healing. Don’t be sad: The joy of the Lord is your strength.” (Out of Sorts, p. 180-81).

This kind of subtle environment is why I stopped going to church.

I am aware to this day that this was a hard thing for my family. It probably came across as a rejection of the environment of their faith that they hold dear. Or perhaps just a huge loss, or a fear, that their daughter was walking away from the way they had raised her. My parents and I are only just now starting to have more honest conversations about this. This reality, I suspect, might be a place for them to sit in lament. God this wasn’t what I had planned. I wanted my daughter to stay in community and fellowship with me in this place that is so all-important to my life. Now it feels like I’ve been cut out of her life in the places it matters to me most. If my parents or family happen to read this, then I would look them in the eyes and say, yes. That is a valid grief. You don’t have to hide it. If you still have need, sit with it in all its raw honesty. Ask God to meet you in it. I agree, it’s not the ideal that any of us once had in mind. While we walk this broken earth, it may not be a grief that can be tangibly resolved. What do we do with that? One of the answers is lament.

A Sacred Sorrow

The first book that made its way into my hands on this subject was A Sacred Sorrow: Reaching Out to God in the Lost Language of Lament by Michael Card. It was one of the first books that met me in my mess and showed me that my mess was okay. He takes a lot of time to relate how the scriptures themselves are full of lament: the Psalms, the prophets, the story of Job, even Y’shua himself in the garden of Gethsemane. They all ranted and raved and bitterly wept and God was not angered or put off. In contrast, their words were recorded in the sacred texts to show us examples of how to lament. And of God’s not-running-away-response when we do.

I started sitting in these passages. There was over a year of time where the only passage I could handle reading in scripture was Lamentations chapter 3. When a well-meaning man from my church asked me one day what I was reading, I told him.

“Oh! Don’t sit in that. You should read something happier,” he said.

I nodded politely, but I didn’t take his advice. He didn’t understand that Lamentations 3 was what I needed. It was ministering to me in a deep way, and I wasn’t going to even try to stop sitting there. I sat with it so long that I started re-writing my own version of the text. Here are the first few verses of my translation. Notice how abject and despairing they are.

I—a strong warrior with the ability to fight—is sharing here and now in affliction, poverty, misery, and depression under the overflow and ruling scepter of God’s chastening wrath.

He has driven me away like an animal and made me walk in darkness, obscurity, a secret place of misery and sorrow rather than the bright light of day, the light of His face.

Indeed, His hand (His power and direction) is set against me to turn and overthrow my will. Again and again with persistence, he turns me back all the hours of the day.

He has worn out my body; I am completely used up, as if with old age. He has violently broken in and broken down the substance of my self; I am wrecked, crushed, shattered, and crippled.

He has built up a permanent siege around me with bitterness and travail (there is no escape; it is a struggle to merely survive).

He has made me sit down and set up my abode in hellish darkness (a place like a grave), like those perpetually dead and forgotten.

Just because these words exist in scripture, doesn’t mean this perspective is the full version of the truth. It doesn’t mean that God is indeed fully against me, that I am under his wrath, or that he is the one who has inflicted this suffering and worn me out. But this is the perspective of the writer of Lamentations. This was his experience, his fear, his agony. And this was his lament about how he was experiencing the world and how he was experiencing God in relation to that world. And it’s in scripture to teach us something. Perhaps to validate the writer’s pain. Perhaps to show us that God is not afraid of these kinds of harsh accusatory words. Perhaps to show us that more than one thing can be true at the same time.

So in that season I started writing my own laments. Here is one as an example:

How long will the darkness last?
How long will sorrow weigh down my soul?
Will grief have an end, here in the dark waiting for the dawn?

God, where are you? I have such questions raging in my head.
God, who are you? Have I ever really known you at all?

Who am I? Will I wander forever in this desert land?
Have you left me here to die
in this darkness, a night without a dawn?
Who am I? Stripped of all my worth, my plans,
my love, my trust, a place to call a home?
Do I matter? Should I keep fighting on
through this mess of pain, of grief, of hate, of fear?
Are you good? Are you safe? Why do you seem like such a stranger
when I’ve known you for so long?
Evil creeps, it stalks, it rages, trips me up and holds me down,
sucks the very breath out from my lungs

Why must I learn to forgive,
the bullies stay to fight another day?
Why am I still here
asking these questions somehow unable to walk away?

God, who are you? More questions are the answer in my head.
God where are you?
I want so desperately to know that you are here.

How long will the darkness last?
How long will sorrow weigh down my soul?
Will I find the strength at last
To leave my questions in the darkness behind me?

In the process of lamenting, here is what I have found.

God is not afraid of lament.

Other people may be afraid of lament. It makes them uncomfortable. It reminds them of their own pain. It raises doubts about their faith they’d rather not look at. But none of those things are true for God. Quite the opposite. I have a suspicion that God loves lament.

Lament is also viciously intimate.

It takes raw, unfiltered honesty. Here’s what I think, God. No holds bar. Even more so, here’s what I feel. Raging, weeping, cursing, despondent. You name the emotion, it can be included. Logical or illogical. There it is. No hiding. No diminishing. No tidying up. The whole mess—often thrown in God’s face. Why?! Do you hate me?! What did I do wrong?! My heart is dying! F*** this! Or f*** you! Remember—I said no filter. I’m putting it all out there. If that’s how I feel, then that’s what I say. And here’s what I’ve found.

God is big enough.

He’s not afraid of how I feel. He’s not offended, even if I curse in his face. He’s honored by my honesty. He already knows it’s all in there anyways. So the only one who suffers by trying to keep it in would be me. Eventually, the sharing of my pain helps ease it, gradually. It might take days or weeks or months or years. But eventually the pain often lifts. At least a bit. I can’t make any promises. Each story is different.

For me, it was a gradual process. It’s not like I walked into my therapist’s office or a place of worship one day and walked out having left the mess behind. It was a lot of hard emotional work for years, until somehow one day I looked behind and noticed—I’m not as sad or angry as I used to be. I feel a bit more whole. A bit more trusting.

It’s also never fully over. So many times when I hit places of resistance, anger, or frustration in my life, I’m working with my therapist or my spiritual director and I realize, “Oh, I need to grieve that.” I often need to grieve things about my marriage, about my parenting reality, about the way I’m wired, or the way my husband is wired. About friendships that didn’t pan out, or seasons of loneliness, or the fact that I’m still wrestling with something I thought I might have resolved years ago. There’s no limitation on grief. It goes beyond the big obvious things like death to such small, nuanced places of our lives. Death of a dream or a hope, grief over facing the mundane, perhaps painful existence with an illness or a work environment or… you fill in the blank. Every time there is grief, I find lament is needed in one form or another.

Lament can look like whatever you need it to look like. It might look angry. It might weep bitter tears. It might need to verbalize something to a safe friend. It might need lots of time alone to talk to God. It might ask you to do something physical, like throw something or shred something or build a bonfire and burn something. (Been there! Done that!) It might ask you to create something or plant something or write something or sing something. Find your flair. The point is to be honest. The point is to face the pain and the fear and the doubt and the anger and whatever is bottled up inside and lay it all out there. Don’t stuff it. Don’t run away. Don’t hide in shame.

Context Before Hope

There are more hopeful verses in the middle of Lamentations chapter 3 that are more familiar to the average church-attending protestant: “Because of the mercies of Adonai we will not be consumed, for His compassions never fail. They are new every morning! Great is your faithfulness. ‘Adonai is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore I will hope in Him.’ Adonai is good to those who wait for Him, to the soul that seeks him” (v.22-25). So much more hopeful. People often claim these verses as a promise—God’s mercy is new every morning. Hurray! Something to rejoice in!

But these verses almost always get quoted out of context. It’s hard for me not to get infuriated every time they do. The context is that these verses are buried in the third chapter of a book of lament, twenty-two verses into a brutal chapter of accusing God. The journey of getting there is the point. You can’t arrive at the true depths of the richness of the mercies of God without sitting in the first three chapters of lament first. Maybe for years. They go hand-in-hand. There’s no fast track or skip button. You can try, but it won’t be the hard-won fruit that lasts. We often read a Psalm inside of a minute or two, so we go through the writer’s lament and agony and often arrive at the more uplifting place of trust in seconds. But I often wonder, how many years did it take the author of that Psalm to get to that point? I know it wasn’t that quick. The Psalm encapsulates a journey, but we often focus on the end point and minimize the journey. The result is that we expect other believers to do that too. Yes, I know you’re suffering. Look, the Psalms writer suffered too, but he also came to this conclusion. Can’t you come to that conclusion too?

Lament is not to be hurried.

I can speak from experience that this journey can’t be hurried. It will take the time it will take. Others are often impatient on our behalf. It would ease their discomfort to see our discomfort abate. Perhaps even well-meaning people who don’t know how to give space to it will prolong the time it takes for the journey to complete. In the muddled early stages of my journey, I was working hard to sort things out in counseling and learning to validate my trauma and be kind to myself and practice boundaries. As a result, I needed to pull back from participating in something that made a friend of mine upset. It the midst of a heated interchange, she point-blank asked me if I was walking in joy, because God’s will for me was to be walking in joy. It felt like a dagger of condemnation thrown in my face. Perhaps at the right time, that question could be posed in a gentle way as a thought for inner-searching or something to take to God. But not the way it happened. Joy should not be set in opposition to grief, or used as a cudgel to convince people that if their faith was sound they would be happy, that they wouldn’t be lingering in lament. This person is no longer someone allowed in my inner circle.

People in the midst of the journey can prolong it too. We are often inpatient. We want the pain to go away. Every time I was tired of feeling messy and miserable, I often reached out to try and externally jumpstart my process to force myself into the next stage—a preferably happier stage. But so many times I sensed God saying, uh uh. We’re not done yet. Come back and sit in the wilderness some more. This is where I have you. Don’t leave.

God is in no rush. He lives outside of time. He doesn’t measure it like we do, and to fully lean into the fruit lament can bring forth in our lives, we have to be patient with the process. Unhurried. Enduring. It takes a lot of emotional energy and courage to stay instead of running away.

The church I’m in now is still often not as nuanced as I would prefer, but it does a better job than most at acknowledging space for lament. The worship director has even put on whole services just for this purpose from time to time. Occasionally the lyrics of a song or a liturgy on Sunday morning give validation to the questions and the mess, and that is enough for me to stay in my seat (more often than not) even on the weeks when the messages feel more exultational.

But there were years when I couldn’t even do that. Every time I went to church all I could do was sit and cry, bracing myself not to run away. Easter. I hated Easter most of all. In the darkness service of Friday night I could relate, I could find comfort. Jesus was like me; he was in agony. But I didn’t want the celebration of resurrection. I couldn’t rejoice. I’m just now getting to the point where I can feel my heart lift during a song again. It’s not every week. Only on occasion. I’m not effervescent or ebullient about it. But I am finding my voice. Sometimes I still just listen, but other weeks I actually sing and feel the vibrations in my body. One week I even dared to hold my hands gently in front of me, palms cupped open. Some weeks I find myself self-coaching: yes, I can agree with these words. Yes, this is still true. Yes, it’s okay to sink into this. And some weeks, I still meet resistance. And that’s okay too.

Wherever you are, honor your journey. Create a spaciousness in your life that allows for lament as its needed. Rejoice too, by all means, if it’s within your power. But have grace and compassion on those who cannot. It may look like weak faith, but often it takes incredible strength to lament. Honor that. Sit with it. When you feel the urge to offer a hopeful verse or trite comforting phrase—don’t. Acknowledge the discomfort observing another’s suffering creates within yourself. Get curious. Be present. Lament can be a beautiful thing.

---

To receive my posts delivered straight to your inbox, subscribe below. To reach out with questions or comments, feel free to use the Contact form. Shalom.