Chasing Wisdom by Daniel GrotheChikamu

When we shut out our negative emotions, something in us dies. And the dynamic imago Dei that is the bedrock of our existence suffers damage from the cover-up. Even the most pagan therapists and counselors would agree. But sadly, too many Christians have mistaken lament as faithlessness, when it is actually a sign of faithfulness. To speak up to God is to believe that he cares, that he longs to hear from us, and that he’s willing to take in the full spectrum of our emotions. To speak up to God is to believe that he has the power to act and to change situations that have been intractably stuck for so long. To speak up to God is to believe that his goodness will be the final act in the long drama of our lives.

Lament must not be lost in the life of the church. If Israel cried “How long, O Lord?” over and over again, we, too, must raise our “How long?” to God. As we do, the church becomes what it was always meant to be: a safe haven for all the wounded and the disenfranchised among us, and a place where they can recover their hearts after having recovered their voices.

Because I spent so many years around believers who understood avoidance to be a form of reverence, I have had to slowly practice my way into using truthful speech with God. Over the last few years, I have learned to pray the psalter’s laments, and even written my own in times of trial. I have taken these “How long, O Lord?” prayers (Ps. 13) and prayed them for the starving refugees wandering through the Yemeni wilderness. I have called on the Father and prayed “do not hide your face from” (Ps. 27:9, 102:2) the diseased children in the slums of India. I have prayed “Awake, Lord! Why do you sleep?” (Ps. 44:23) as I thought through the homeless single parents struggling through dead-end jobs and sleeping in their cars in the dark shadows of our cities.

As a pastor, I go into hospital rooms and darkly lit funeral homes and teach people that their cries do not scare God. What we see in the Old Testament, and ultimately in the life of Jesus himself, is that the saints have historically been so secure in their God that they were able to share their most troubling feelings with him.