How do you think God responds to your brokenness?

How do you think God responds to the patterns you're desperate to change but just can’t? How do you think He feels about the trauma you’ve endured, the heartbreak you've experienced, and the sadness you carry in and out of every day?

Angry.

Annoyed.

Frustrated.

Those are the three most common responses I hear from my counseling clients. Many of them think that God is annoyed that they just aren't over their pain yet. They’ve missed the truth that He cares about them. They’ve lost the good news of the gospel under the voices of people who wielded the weapon of religion to dismiss their pain and belittle their hardship. When we feel like people are annoyed, angry, or frustrated with us, our natural response is to draw away from them, to isolate ourselves and find solace in solitude. The same is true of our relationship with God. When we believe He’s angry at us, we don't draw near, we don’t get close, we don't cry out to Him.

We don’t cry out to God because we think He won't come. We forget that we cry out to remind our souls of who our hope is in. We cry out to remind ourselves that there is a God listening on the other end. We cry out to release the mental, emotional, and spiritual burdens that accumulate in the silence of our minds. We cry out because it teaches us that, even in our pain, we are worthy of being heard and that there is one bigger than the pain we’re carrying. When we cry out to God, we expose our hearts and attune our ears to the real-time divine presence and comfort that God is offering us in the darkest days of our lives.

For those of us recovering from trauma, anxiety, and depression, calling on God is a complicated task. The weight of our mental and emotional state makes it hard to call on the Person who can give us divine comfort. We don’t know what to say, or how to invite Him into our experience of suffering. Though we’ve heard that God is Emmanuel: God With us, we struggle with how to make space for Him.

Over the next seven days, I’ll walk you through the five key components of the spiritual discipline called Lament. Lament is a spiritual practice that allows us to invite God into our suffering by crying out to Him in the midst of our pain. So many of us have heard the words “lay it all at the altar,” but so few of us have been taught how to do that. This is the how. We’ll begin our practice day-by-day and on our last day we’ll combine our knowledge and practice from each day to create a personal Lamentation that will open our hearts to God in the midst of our hard season.

God sees your pain. He longs to meet you in it. All you have to do is cry out to the loving Father, and He will show you that He’s already there.