At the end of May, I wept at my uncle’s funeral. The next day, I held my Nana’s still- warm hand for the last time as I stood beside her hospice bed. We had driven 5 hours to see her, only to arrive 30 minutes after she had passed. My husband was asked to check her pulse. We ate dinner with her in the room, still uncovered, until the coroner could arrive. The next day I found every card I had ever sent her and tried on all of her beautiful, old coats.
Two weeks later, I stared at a chaplain in an otter-printed tie as he asked me what I loved about my mother. The air was cold and dry in the hospital lobby. I stared back at him, unable to speak. All the talk of brain tumors and next steps was suffocating. For a few days, as her mind and faculties waned, we prayed, drank watery coffee, cried, worshipped, and prayed more. She is recovering from radiation, but it’s been no walk in the hospital rose garden. No brain tumors, but three weeks and two broken legs later, she’s in an outpatient home.
Then my husband and I spent the last hours of my birthday in a clinic waiting to see if he needed his appendix removed. The next day, my sister was in the ER. So much for my hopes of just one day without medical drama.
I am currently sitting in a radiology clinic waiting room. My husband was just taken in for imaging. There’s something a little too familiar about the antiseptic smell of this place, but maybe I’ve been at the hospital too much.
I have bawled my eyes out on the freeway, prayed silent, accusatory prayers from the dark church balcony, and have found that the lamenting—the act of expressing grief or sorrow before the Lord—does not happen in a straight, predictable line.
When my mother was diagnosed with cancer more than ten years ago, lament was uncharted territory; I didn’t know that there was a place for grief in my life, especially in the life of someone who believes in a literal Resurrection. Before this month, I thought I knew how to lament. What I am still learning is that lament doesn’t have a set speed or length of time. God (believe it or not!) rarely divulges how long a particular season will be. The only time-related promise seems to be Jesus’ words to his disciples just before the ascension:
“I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).
A Useful Blueprint: Psalm 42
They say if you want to learn to paint, you first need to learn to imitate. Well, I think the same principle works for lament. Psalm 42 has long been a scriptural safe harbor for me; it’s the one I turn to for comfort, but also to use as a roadmap in my grieving. Not only can I co-opt the words into my own prayers, but I can also take the Psalm’s structure as a blueprint for my own lamenting. Due to similarities in structure and content, Psalm 42 is often paired with Psalm 43, but we’ll just look at 42 for now:
Why Are You Cast Down, O My Soul?
To the choirmaster. A Maskil of the Sons of Korah.
42 As a deer pants for flowing streams,
so pants my soul for you, O God.
2 My soul thirsts for God,
for the living God.
When shall I come and appear before God?
3 My tears have been my food
day and night,
while they say to me all the day long,
“Where is your God?”
4 These things I remember,
as I pour out my soul:
how I would go with the throng
and lead them in procession to the house of God
with glad shouts and songs of praise,
a multitude keeping festival.
5 Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you in turmoil within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
my salvation[c] 6 and my God.
My soul is cast down within me;
therefore I remember you
from the land of Jordan and of Hermon,
from Mount Mizar.
7 Deep calls to deep
at the roar of your waterfalls;
all your breakers and your waves
have gone over me.
8 By day the Lord commands his steadfast love,
and at night his song is with me,
a prayer to the God of my life.
9 I say to God, my rock:
“Why have you forgotten me?
Why do I go mourning
because of the oppression of the enemy?”
10 As with a deadly wound in my bones,
my adversaries taunt me,
while they say to me all the day long,
“Where is your God?”
11 Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you in turmoil within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
my salvation and my God.
First, when breaking down any Psalm, it’s helpful to note any repeated words or phrases. The refrain, “Why are you cast down…?” turns up in verses 5 and 11, and it’s this line that helps reveal the writer’s problem: utmost despair.
The Psalm starts out with an expression of longing for God (v1-2) before further illustrating the speaker’s unrelenting pain. In verse 4, he looks back on when times were good and worshipping God felt easier. Then at verse 5, there’s this moment of preaching-to-self that we see carry all the way into Psalm 43. He asks him own soul, “Why are you cast down?” before assuring himself that He will praise God again.
Then in verses 6-10, we get a deeper look into the speaker’s suffering. Ever feel like God has forgotten about you? Well, this writer did, and his thoughts made it into the Bible! (v 9). This section is a mix of emotions: reminders of God’s powerful, overwhelming love described as “breakers and waves” (v7), as well as a recognition of the author’s isolation as others cruelly mock him (v 10).
He finishes with a callback to that first admission of despair mixed with hope from verse 5: “Why are you cast down… Hope in God; for I shall again praise him…” (v 11).
Now, stay with me. Back in college I wrote a paper on this exact Psalm, arguing that this was simply a two-step prayer. God, I’m sad. But everything’s totally okay because I know who you are. I don’t see it that way anymore.
Psalm 42 is not the result of delusion. There is a reason the speaker pairs these two sentiments of despair and hope together in verses 5 and 11. It’s not that he is forcing himself to jump quickly from sadness to hope. He is feeling both of these emotions at the same time.
That’s the blueprint.
Cry out to God. Recognize God’s character and presence in the midst of it. Cry out to God again. Preach truth to your heart. Repeat for as long an necessary.
Learning lament
My job is not to hurry up and rid myself, or anyone else, of humanity in the name of the Lord. If lament is a biblical principle, then we need to learn how to do it, as well as how to allow others to do it, no strings or timelines attached.
This season of loss and grief has been unexpectedly long and grueling, but it’s made me ask myself, how many times have I slapped an “it’s okay” on someone’s heartbreaking situation because deep down, I’m scared it won’t be?
How has my (at-times) toxic positivity invalidated the feelings of a friend in honest suffering because I’m worried God’s reputation might be at stake if I don’t whip out a Bible verse?
My deep discomfort with lament is cultural, but as we can see in the Psalms, it’s not biblical. God is no less good because life sometimes isn’t. Even more surprising, sometimes it’s the season of lament that uproots the most dysfunction, and brings forth the greatest harvest in my heart. Paul’s writings to the church in Rome tells us how.
Hard-won harvest
In Romans, the apostle Paul discusses the fruits of suffering, and it sounds absolutely crazy at face value. He writes this to the church in Rome:
“Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us” (Rom. 5:3-5, emphasis mine).
To glory in suffering sounds masochistic! What good can come from it? But in God’s Kingdom, suffering can cultivate a harvest of character that times of plenty can’t.
According to Paul, suffering can lead to perseverance, character, and hope. These are hard-won treasures which will not put us to shame. Like pure metal, they’re refined only in fire.
Theology of suffering
I’ve rubbed elbows with all kinds of Christians, from Anglicans to Adventists, and I can tell you that we’ve all got a theology of suffering. I’ve worshipped in spaces that tried to convince me that my chronic headaches were the result of some sort of secret sin I was committing. I’ve also met those who tend to de-personalize pain; according to them, suffering can only be the result of other peoples’ problems, never my own knuckle-headed decisions. Ultimately, our view of suffering is just a byproduct of our overall view of God.
Take the young man in John 9, for instance.
In the passage, a young man who was blind from birth becomes the subject of the disciples’ theological chatter. Who sinned: him, or his parents? According to the culture at the time, what we might call a birth defect was seen as judgement. Jesus rejects the belief that his physical ailment is a consequence of sin. He says, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him” (John 9:3).
Jesus knew that the young man had done nothing to earn his blindness—just like he would do nothing to earn his healing. In this situation, it was to glorify God before the shocked Pharisees and neighbors that he would be healed by Jesus’ power alone.
Sometimes we suffer the direct consequences of the sin we choose.
Sometimes we suffer because someone else has sinned against us.
And sometimes, we have to acknowledge that the world is broken and in need of a Redeemer. Jesus is that Redeemer who can make beauty from our pain, whether that be through a testimony of complete external healing, or—and this is severely underrated—through a person’s inner healing; through the deepening of their character through long, slow years without many answers; through a heart learning to cling to Jesus when every other support crumbles. It’s that kind of suffering that produces fruit and points to the work of the Spirit.
So sometimes He allows it, but He doesn’t waste a thing.
He suffered, too
Near the end of my grad school program, one of my professors set up a cohort zoom call. This was pretty weird because up until that point, the program had been completely remote with no face-to-face interaction. But after a year and a half of talking to these people three or more times per week, praying over their requests and following up about mine, it was a surprisingly emotional experience to see their faces and finally hear the real voices.
These people knew what kind of sacrifice it took to complete the program. They knew what it was like to write several papers per week and still feel behind because of that pesky looming Capstone project, dang it. I felt bonded with them because they knew what I was going through.
That’s how I think of Jesus when I am in a season of lament.
Jesus is the man of sorrows, well acquainted with grief (Isaiah 53:3). The writer of Hebrews describes him as the high priest who represents us with an understanding of what it’s like to be us:
“Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:14-16).
Jesus was constantly reviled, wrongly accused, and suffered rejection throughout his ministry. Jesus, who knew the outcome of the cross, still expressed his distress in Gethsemane. He quoted from Psalm 22 in the midst of the most publicly humiliating and gruesome death, yet he did not sin.
Why do we assume that we can do what Jesus never did and slap on a happy face in our own pain?
No. Jesus made use of lament during his ministry. When he first arrived at the tomb of Lazarus, whom he intended to raise, he didn’t immediately launch into a pep talk with three distilled points.
He wept.
And we, who have been loved to life by this great high priest, have the privilege of sharing in his sufferings.
What happens when I try to shortcut my own process of lament? For one, if I don’t take time to feel it, my grief is probably just going to come out at some inopportune time. Pain needs to be dealt with, not stashed in a drawer. But when it’s dealt with in the arms of my Father, who knows my suffering because He took it on in is flesh? There’s a closeness with Jesus there I wouldn’t have experienced otherwise.
Why do we assume that we can do what Jesus never did and slap on a happy face in our own pain?
The House of the Lord forever
One of my issues as someone who loves the Bible is the joy I get from connecting with an “obscure” or rarely-preached-on passage. Most of the time it’s pride masquerading as nerdiness, I think. But there is something to be said for those famous passages read at weddings and funerals. They are timeless, and no less true because of their popularity. Psalm 23 is one of those passage for me. If you grew up in church, you’ve probably recited ‘The Lord is my Shepherd, I have all that I need” (Ps. 23: 1).
Only recently have I realized how important the end of the passage really is, especially if you’re currently going through hard times. The last few lines go like this:
“You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;
You anoint my head with oil; my cup runs over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,
And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever” (Psalm 23: 5b-6).
I used to think that goodness and mercy meant that God would give me an earthly backpay of promotion and money and stuff if I had suffered for a bit. But what if the goodness and mercy comes from fellowship with the Son, at a table I don’t even deserve to be at, simply because He is good?
In the presence of an enemy, Jesus can still draw near. His goodness can follow me all the days of my life–at the funeral, beside the hospice bed, in a palliative care meeting. Jesus comes to me in places I never wanted to go.
And then there’s that last bit about dwelling.
Jesus’ reflex is to be near us, live with us, and dwell among us. Long before his incarnate birth, the prophet Isaiah said Jesus would be “Emmanuel,” or “God with us” (Isa. 7:14). It’s a theme we see from the Genesis Garden, to the desert days of the Tabernacle, to the Temple, and finally in the new Heavens and Earth. I love that John’s word for “dwelt” in John 1:14, σκηνόω, is literally tabernacled. It’s a lovely word picture describing a God who enters not only into our world, but into our pain to redeem us from it.
No matter how deep your pain, Jesus longs to set up camp with you, to dwell with you, and to care for you.
And no matter how long you must lament, He’s not leaving.
Kayley Chartier 