Although I find it hard to do myself, I think that lament is one of the core things that is important for a believer to acknowledge and give space for. Like repentance and confession, lament is a natural response to being in God’s presence, being in God’s word, knowing God’s heart, and hearing God’s voice.
In the light of God’s nature, the nature of ourselves and the broken world around us—the way it affects us and causes us to interact with each other, is shattering to our new heart in Christ.
I think the overwhelming or unpleasant nature of this causes us to ignore things or delay or distract ourselves from facing these hard realities.
I often don’t want to be honest with myself and let what I don’t want to believe or realize be what they actually are.
Sit with them until they’re finished burning.
Until the reality is just coals… cooling embers in my mind.
There is something incredibly humbling about truly grieving.
If we don’t make (and take) space to lament, don’t we merely sow selfish bitterness as a pattern in our lives for when other hard, cruel, or devastating things happen?
Lament is truly processing grief, and not just the parts we can articulate, but the things we know and feel that have no words.
For me there are whole chunks of my past that I don’t even know how to process and grieve.
In those spaces I attempt to press into knowing that the Lord is groaning with me—and on my behalf—with a depth that cannot be conveyed (Romans 8:26).
spilling in through the unwashed
windows sun
you come softly in beside my pain
and I don’t need words to know
you know.
And even though your presence
means everything –
the feelings inside me are
all I can feel
overwhelm them somehow
please
so I can breathe
because my thoughts make no
sense now and all I know is the
grip of this terrible thing
bring life from this
death valley
my mind
give me the lungs to wail
out the sorrow for all
the uncreation that i have done
That has been done to me.
& from my tears
cause the desert to break forth
into bloom