How Do We Faithfully Live within Our Finitude?

Gratitude and Lament

Despite pressures from both outside and within the church, lament and thanksgiving are not in a contest. The Bible calls us to both. Don’t pick between Psalm 22 and Psalm 23: believers are allowed to cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Ps. 22:1) in their distress, and at the same time confidently declare, “The LORD is my Shepherd” (23:1). These expressions are not tied to good and bad times but to the one God, who is present in both: we gain confidence in God’s kindness and provision when we “walk through the valley of the shadow of death” (23:4 KJV). If we try to choose one and not both, we risk turning our lament into hopeless despair or reducing divine promises to shallow clichés. When we engage both lament and gratitude, then each becomes stronger and truer.

Now to the key point. Lament and gratitude are mirror concepts that highlight the same fundamental truth: we are dependent on the God who rescues us. Only when we accept our creaturely finitude will this make sense to us. When things are hard, troubling, and wrong, we lean on God, voicing our fears and frustrations to the Creator and Sustainer. We depend on him to make right what is wrong, to heal what is diseased, to reconcile what is broken, to forgive what sins have been committed.

Christians are remarkable and different because we are encouraged to resist picking between honest assessment of hardships and hopeful confidence in God’s presence. We push against despair with gratitude and thanksgiving. Finding the fingerprints of God around us requires practice, intent, and perhaps some training. Those who attend to the path will find plenty of reasons to be grateful and rejoice, but those who stop looking will only grow further disillusioned and distressed.

We rejoice because we remember what God has done, we look for what he is doing, and we identify his presence and kindness in whatever is good, noble, just, peace producing, and worthy of praise. We don’t need to be infinite to recognize God’s good presence and action, and this perception brings us confidence and comfort even in the midst of our finite and fallen lives.

Most of all, we are a grateful people because we are confident of who God is and that God is with us, because we see Christ and are filled with his Spirit. The wickedness, the sadness, and the frustrations all remain worthy of our laments and action, but the laments are not all there is: Christ did not merely die; he rose, and he will come again. Christ is with us, God is near, and that is a fact always worth chewing on.