Grieving With Hope After Miscarriage And Loss By Adriel BookerНамуна

Day Five

An Invitation to Lament

Scripture: Psalm 130:1-2

Nothing I’ve experienced has made me more desperate for the hope of kingdom come than straddling a toilet, bleeding life from my womb. I never knew I could cry so much. Or hope so much. 

While mourning the loss of my babies, I had to learn the song of lament. Lament is the language of grief tinged with the hope for deliverance. It was new to me, awkward and unfamiliar. I grew up singing about how awesome God is and how my soul longeth after him and how Jesus shines, but giving voice to anguish and brokenness—this I had to learn in the dark, arms open, tripping my way forward. 

Lament is more than just sadness; lament acknowledges injustice mixed into our pain. Almost half of the psalms are dedicated to lament—both corporate and personal—and yet it’s all but absent from our tidy Sunday morning hymnals. We’re far more comfortable celebrating Jesus’s victory than we are holding space for the reason we need it in the first place. And so, when suffering comes like a wrecking ball into our cozy status quo—as it does—we are blindsided. 

Lament invites us to a liminal space. The word liminal connotes the idea of a threshold—a space between what was and what will be. The implication is a moving forward into something new, but not without first being transformed by the in-between. Liminal spaces feel disorienting because they are. 

In the middle of grief, it can seem as if your old world is falling apart and you don’t yet have glimpses of the new one. You might feel the movements toward a new kind of faith as you realize that God’s goodness is not dependent on your circumstances or the metrics you tend to use when life is comfortable. (I don’t know about you, but I am sometimes guilty of enjoying favorable circumstances and proclaiming, “Isn’t God good?!” while forgetting to proclaim his goodness when life unfolds in ways that hurt.) 

It’s like learning to open your eyes under water: Even though you know it’s possible, it feels awkward, frightening, and cumbersome at first. And yet the more you practice, the more natural and liberating it feels. Eyes wide open to God’s goodness—even in the midst of loss—changes the way everything else looks too. 

What would lament in your life look like today? Have you experienced this liminal space of lament, as if you are in between life as you knew it and life as it’s going to be? (Explain.)