Bravery: Embracing the Lament

My twenties were punctuated by pain. They started with the fracturing of my own family of origin and the forming of my new nuclear family.  I moved many times, often an outsider to community.  I birthed my children and my career and with them came the pain of unexpected physical hardship and mental anguish at the hands of chronic insomnia.  I spent a lot of my 20’s crying.  Weeping actually.  Weeping for lack of relief from endless long nights.  Weeping because I hadn’t fully grieved what I had lost as a child while now also becoming a mother.  Weeping because becoming a mother didn’t save me like I thought it might but opened a new depth of insecurity.  Weeping because of the things I was seeing in the hospital as a nurse and could not yet process.  Weeping because I had fewer and fewer answers and more questions.

Enter: the lament.

These past few years have been all about lamenting.  I had never thought about casting my complaints upon God in this way and then suddenly this way became the only way.  It was in books I was reading like Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, it was in counseling sessions I was attending, it was in a myriad of conversations with friends, it was through courses like “Healing the wounds of trauma” that I attended.  Of course, it was also in the centre of the biggest book of scripture.

It was like a lantern held out in a dark night. 

I didn’t know that part of becoming brave in the middle of my life would have to do with naming the shame I have worn, naming the guilt I have borne, and naming the fears that I have swallowed.  I didn’t know that becoming brave would involve truly grieving what has been in order to embrace what is.

You see, to lament is not just cry but cry out.  To not just list my complaints to God like a honey-do list but perhaps accuse him with that list, and watch as those accusations bounce off his stalwart faithfulness. He is strong enough to handle my strong words.  It has required a lot of reflection and quiet.  It’s like I have been slowly unraveling layers of polite grumblings, to reveal the nakedness of my soul underneath with all the deep-seated questions I carry like “do you really love me?”   I am learning to lay my heavy garments down, and believe that in laying these garments down I can exchange them for praise.  Only in that exposed state can I put on His truth like new clothes.  Only then can I remind myself of His character, and again vow to trust Him even in my lack of understanding and lack of relief.  Only then am I just a pile of flesh and bone, a reminder of the difference between Him the Creator and I the Created.

Lamenting has become a beautiful and sacred practice of my faith taking me to a place of deeper vulnerability and intimacy.  I have seen the power it holds to heal as I go inward and downward to the core of my loss experiences, with the Father at my side.  But I have especially experienced its power in groups to let the unvoiced things become voiced.  I have seen the relief it can bring to a group of a refugee women who have experienced horrors and trauma as they collectively wail and collectively reorient themselves to the truth of who God is even in suffering.

We all cry out ‘relief, relief’ and therein lies our connection to one another in humanity and our connection to our suffering Saviour.

To try it out for yourself, not as a ritual but as a means to connect to Jesus try expressing your own lament:

[adapted from ‘Healing the Wounds of Trauma’]

Read Psalm 13 and use the way that David lamented as a guide

Write it out, sing it out, weep it out, pray or bring it to a trusted friend or mentor. 

Grieve, dear friend.  Perhaps now is the time for you to finally grieve. 

Start with an address to God “Oh God, Oh helper, Oh maker”

Review God’s faithfulness to you in the past

Give the fullness of your complaint

Confess any sin he reveals or your own claim to innocence

Cry out for help (what do you really need him to do for you)

What might be God’s response (not necessarily stated, but how might He be responding to you?)

A vow to praise or to continue to trust in Him even in this

We grieve sometimes the same thing in different seasons for different reasons.  Have you lamented in this season?