In Seasons of Depair and Grief
In Seasons of Despair and Grief…
My hope is to encourage those of us who are feeling some pain and sadness in this crisis. My daughter, who is a nurse, said that a local hospital is seeing a high number of people affected by alcohol and drug use lately. Numbers she hasn’t seen before. Wrong ways to cope! For some of us perhaps it’s more respectful things like overeating to assuage hungers that are deeper than we think, and binging on TV, and the like. Our governments deem liquor stores to be essential. Essential for coping with what? Drowning our sorrows? But what do you do the morning after? It’s so much easier to deny pain than having it!
Henry Nouwen makes this point about pain and sadness.
“The hardships we all endure require more than words, of course, even spiritual words. Eloquent phrases cannot soothe our deep pain. But we do find something to lead and guide us through. We hear an invitation to allow our mourning to become a place of healing, and our sadness a way through pain to dancing. Who is it Jesus said would be blessed? “Those who mourn, for they will find comfort” (in God, with the people of God). We learn to look fully into our losses, not evade them. By Greeting life’s pain with something other than denial we may find something unexpected. By inviting God into our difficulties we ground life—even its sad moments—in joy and hope. When we stop grasping our lives we can finally be given more than we could ever grab for ourselves. And we learn the way to a deeper love for others.”
Pain denied is pain waiting to wreak havoc at an unsuspected time. Loss must be faced, or it will show up in unknown ways. Present sadness shrugged is future joy denied. Psalm 30:11-12 is a lament with a hopeful end: You have turned my mourning into dancing: you have taken off my sackcloth and clothed me with joy, so that my soul may praise you and not be silent. O Lord, my God, I will give thanks to you forever.
How then could we express present sadness, isolation, and loss without folding in on ourselves. We have a whole library of Scripture and the experience of thousands of years and untold numbers of followers of the way to help us. It’s called the Psalter (the book of Psalms). The Psalms teach us to pray “in seasons of despair and grief” in order to find the relief God is happy to give. The fact is, virus or no virus, the tears of this world are too many not to lament. Before the crisis, there were many broken lives to be sad about. And after too.
When we lose the ability to lament, we lose an opportunity to share with our God the things of this world that are breaking our hearts, and his, and we risk becoming a quietly cynical people.
For some lamenting is totally new and possibly uncomfortable. I get it. It’s awkward to tell God why you’re sad and to complain to him about him (why have you forsaken me?). Yet when we do, we participate in what God does: And Jesus wept—wailed bitterly for Lazarus! He lamented, with many tears, the state of affairs in Jerusalem. God, like us, is not unaffected by the weight of our tears (Psalm 56:8). God laments! He has his own pool of tears nearby just as we do. “He took my pains and my sorrows and made them his very own.”
Paul Miller speaks these profound and helpful thoughts in his book: A Praying Life:
We think laments are disrespectful. God says the opposite. Lamenting shows you are engaged with God in a vibrant, living faith. We live in a deeply broken world. If the pieces of our world aren’t breaking your heart and you aren’t in God’s face about them, then ...you’ve thrown in the towel.
There is a Christian subculture that refuses to acknowledge that we have pain inside the church too. But we refuse to lament. We refuse to acknowledge the dark and difficult realities of our lives and our world in a way that honestly demonstrates our dependency on the Lord. The reality, though, is that we have a deep need for this way of praying and a large sample in the Bible for how we can do it.
Start today learning to lament with the Psalmist. Become a lifelong student of the Psalms. This week, as Holy Spirit leads you, pray any of Psalms 3-7, 18, or 22 to learn the ways of lament. Notice the complaint, who it is that is thought of as the enemy, what the one praying is hearing by way of assurance. Blessings await you!