Learning to Lament

What do you do when, after repeated faith-filled prayers for healing, no healing arrives? You’re still suffering. Dark clouds of frustration have descended. No amount of minimizing the pain or trying to talk it out of existence works.

We need to learn the grace and power of lament. We need to vent our thoughts honestly to our compassionate and caring God. That’s what Job did. Initially, after the pain of bereavement and catastrophic loss, he stayed silent. When he finally broke his silence, it’s as if he is howling his complaints to God. He cries out, Why did I not perish at birth, and die as I came from the womb? (Job 3:11). It doesn’t sound appropriate for a person of deep faith, does it? Yet his words are preserved for us.

I remember opening a Bible app and reading one of the lament Psalms, Psalm 13, out loud to God as I walked the beach near our home. I was in the vice grip of my third trigeminal neuralgia episode at the time. The pain was unbearable. I read verse 1: How long, LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?

For most of my life, I’ve been too embarrassed to express what I’m really thinking to God. Silly I know, as he knows my train of thoughts exactly. Not this day. I told God how inappropriate this debilitating pain was at a time of productive ministry to pastors in the majority world. In soul agony, I used David’s desperate plea as a template to call out to God and ask for healing from TN yet again. Then I used verse 3 to express my quiet trust in God:

But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing the LORD’s praise for he has been good to me. There was no instant healing, but a deep peace enveloped me. The power of that moment wasn’t just my honesty, but that it was expressed to God who knows all about suffering. I was resting in God’s goodness and trusting his heart for healing.

Pouring out honest thoughts to God is what Jeremiah did in a whole book we call Lamentations. That’s the key, he’s not complaining to people, he’s crying out to God. Chapters 1:1 through 3:10 of Lamentations are like the dark night of Jeremiah’s soul. It’s unvarnished honesty to God. Then we reach the pinnacle of the book Lamentations 3:21-26—the dawning of hope. Meditate on these phrases today: His compassions never fail. They are new every morning: great is your faithfulness. I say to myself, “The LORD is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.”

The LORD, these reassuring words remind us, is always tender, always kind, always good to us. His gentleness never dries up. The river of his faithfulness is flowing to us morning by morning.

• If your pain is overwhelming today, if the clouds are dark, then access the grace of lament.
• Lay out to God exactly what you are thinking in the form of a written or verbal prayer and express your quiet confidence in his unending love.

Excerpts from The Point of Your Thorns: Finding Purpose in Your Pain

by Rowland Forman