On Lament - A Reflection by Horizons Fellow Haley Stocks '22

Growing up, I remember my grandmother's house decorated with small cross-stitch pictures and pillows with Bible verses such as "He has made everything beautiful in its time," Ecclesiastes 3:11, or "Yet the Lord will command his loving kindness in the day time, and in the night his song shall be with me, and my prayer unto the God of my life," Psalm 42:8.

 While these verses and verses like them are pleasant, loving, gentle, are undeniably true, there are a variety of other verses that I have yet to see decoratively displayed in a home. Now, I don't know about you, but I have never seen a throw pillow with "Be merciful to me, Lord, for I am faint; O Lord, heal me, for my bones are in agony. My soul is in anguish. How long, O Lord, how long?" Psalms 6:2-3.

While I don't think this verse pairs as well with pastel flowers placed around it as the other two do, I think it reveals another aspect of our human nature and God's divine nature. Life, this side of Heaven, will be fraught with moments of pain and suffering, even for those who are followers of Christ (John 16:33). So if there is to be suffering, what are we supposed to do with that?

For a long time, I thought it was to pretend that everything was fine. To move on from moments of pain as if they had never happened. To be nice, happy, and pleasant because, after all, "Life is Good." For a while, this worked; minor problems could be skimmed over and moved on from relatively quickly, but then I got older, the problems got bigger (or perhaps I started to realize that they were there). Suddenly it wasn't as easy to skip past things that happened, hurts in the world, or the uncertainty of what goodness practically looked like in a fallen world.

The world had many more problems than an argument with one of my siblings or something I had broken. I knew I was supposed to not be angry and to forgive and do all of those other things that were offhandedly mentioned to you as a kid. But forgiveness and joy seem a little harder when you see the look of grief in one of your friends' eyes at her mom's funeral, or you realize someone you care about is probably not going to get better, or something happens to someone who undoubtedly did nothing to deserve it. Suddenly, joy and forgiveness felt a lot farther away.

What was once something that felt very simple seemed a lot more complicated and a lot harder of a hill to climb. How do you pray for your enemies (Matthew 5:44) after everything they've done to hurt people and who show no remorse for ever having done so? Or the people you don't know anything other than what they've done wrong? How can you trust that God is good when everything in the world seems to be so tainted?

But brokenness and grief are not new, they're concepts that humankind has been wrestling with since the fall from Eden. There was perfection that no longer exists in this world due to the entrance of sin, and so we lament.

Lament. A somewhat loaded word. One that for a long time felt like a "churchy" word, something that we learned about because it was in the Bible but didn't have a lot of bearing for people living here and now. Lament was a far-off concept for people who either had trouble trusting in God's plan or had problems much bigger than the ones I was wrestling with. After all, I didn't know anyone in war or experiencing famine or any of the other Old Testament trials.

However, as I began to read more of the passages of the Bible of people calling out to God in times of trial, I realized that these were the pain-filled words of ordinary people who, yes, were facing huge problems, but more so were wrestling with the notion that something in their life seemed amiss. Lament is the heart's cry that things are not as they should be; something somewhere has gone wrong.

The brokenness of sin is not a solvable problem by human means. It took the willing sacrifice of Jesus on the cross to cover that debt, and so why should I expect to be able to solve or move past sin-filled problems in my life without the help of God. Lament gives us an avenue from which to approach God with heavy hearts filled with the world's grief and offer them to the only one who truly understands how truly weighty those problems are.

Lament is sadness, but it's sadness before God. If God wants us to be honest with him, that means being honest with this. Because God doesn't just want me in my happiness or the high after a great worship night. He wants me when I'm crying about problems too big for me alone to handle. When I'm too angry to articulate words, he wants me to bring that before Him.

That's a scary thought because lament is not surface level; it's deep and hurts, but we serve a God who can use that heart and turn it into a way to love His people better. Lament is our hearts crying out that something is broken. It's the recognition that something is not as it was designed to be, recognizing where sin has entered the world.

When we love big, we grieve big. The world is broken, and there will be a pain, and there will be suffering; that much has been promised. We would be remiss not to have an emotional response to this reality. But lament goes beyond that reality. It calls us to bring our struggling and emotional wreckage before God because while we may be small in our suffering, God is big in His love. Christ knows suffering like none of us do because he bore the pain of each of our suffering on the cross for our sakes, and so there's no form of pain that we can bring before Him that He has not overcome.

Maybe one day I'll have a throw pillow with Psalms 6:2-3 on it; I think it would be an interesting conversation piece and, more importantly, a striking reminder of the universality of us feeling lament and who we are called to bring it before.