This is what the LORD says: “A cry is heard in Ramah [and Pompey] — deep anguish, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel [and all of us] weep for her children [for the Siau family], refusing to be comforted– for her children are gone.” (Jeremiah 31:15 NLT, adapted)
We are all overcome with deep anguish, lamentation, and bitter weeping – as well as shock, outrage, anger, confusion, and questioning. Our hearts are heavy and tears are close to the surface as we hear more and more about what happened to David, McKenzie, Christy, Bohden, Kaylin, and Christina Siau last Sunday evening. When we think about what happened and what this will mean for the Siau family, our thoughts becomes nearly unbearable. Our groanings are too deep for words. We are overcome with waves of bitter weeping and feel like we are on the brink of the pit of despair.
How do we respond to the trauma of what has happened to this family? How do we process the trauma we’re personally experiencing as we try to process what happened? How do we do this in a way that draws us to God rather than distances us from God? To try to ignore, deny, or stuff our grief, pain, and anger will slowly poison our souls. To believe the subtle lie that we should not question God about this will only embitter and slowly petrify our relationship with Him. No, instead I believe what Ann Weems said is true: “Our only hope is to march ourselves to the throne of God and in loud lament cry out the pain that lives in our souls.”
God created us to experience grief, sorrow, anguish, and even righteous anger in response to the pain of loss and trauma. It’s part of being human – part of being created in the image of the God who himself grieves and becomes angry over the outworkings of sin and evil in the world. God also created us with the need to share and process these emotions with each other. And God gave us a powerful kind of prayer to help us properly express our grief, pain, and anger and work through it together: the prayer called a lament.
To prayerfully lament is to bring our grief, pain, and anger honestly before God in a way that leads to greater trust. Ruth Haley Barton writes that the prayer of lament is that unsettling biblical tradition of prayer that includes expressions of complaint, anger, grief, despair, and protest to God. She notes that many of us have never been taught this way of praying and it is often missing in the worship of many congregations. Yet we find prayers of lament throughout the Bible, particularly in the Psalms and the Book of Lamentations. Trauma after trauma happened to God’s people both individually (abuse, rape, abandonment, murder) and as a community (wars, captivity, displacement, famines). The many appearances of lamenting in the Bible tells us that God’s people found comfort in bringing their pain to God and being completely honest about how they feel, and it encourages us to follow this model in the midst of our grief, pain, and trauma.
Lament is about being appropriately honest and authentic with God. He knows what we’re feeling, and he invites us to express it to him – to name our feelings, ask our hard questions, plead for his action, and pour out our pain before him. As Mark Vroegop says, “lament refuses to give God the silent treatment.” And the pattern of lament that God gives us in the Bible leads us in how to do this in a way that ultimately draws us closer to God in deeper trust and faith.
As I have been preparing for this coming Sunday’s Service of Lament, I have spent time reading and praying through many Psalms of lament in the Bible, including Psalms 10, 13, 22, 31, 44, 69, 73, 77, 80, 88, 90, 102 and 109. What I have seen there (with help from some other resources) is a pattern in how the people of God have prayed in lament:
(1) God first invites us to put words to the pain we feel. Because this pain is often too deep for words, we commonly see the psalmists using metaphors or imagery, like “My heart is a stone, heavy and lifeless,” or “I walk with anger. Every footprint burns the ground.” This expression of pain also asks honest questions, such as “Why have you let this happen?” or “Why don’t you intervene and stop this evil?” It even includes expressing our honest wrestling with God, as in expressions such as “This isn’t fair,” or “I don’t understand what you are doing.”
(2) The pattern then continues with remembering what God is like (his character and his attributes). The psalmists recall what they have seen or heard that God has done in the past that demonstrate his love, faithfulness, etc. While we may not be able to release the pain that we’re presently experiencing, recalling who God is and how we have seen or heard evidences of that in the past will encourage us as we walk through this dark valley.
(3) Lamenting prayer then moves toward asking God to intervene. We see the psalmists specifically pleading for what they want God to do and how they want him to respond to the situation. The model here is to make our heart’s deepest desire for the situation known to God in desperate pleading.
(4) Finally, these biblical prayers of lament conclude with committing to trust and worship God. This may seem the hardest step of prayer, but the previous three steps prepare us for this. Even if our feelings aren’t all there yet, we can commit to thank or praise God in the midst of this painful season. Perhaps the greatest example of this is that of Jeremiah in Lamentations 3:19-24 where he concludes his lamenting prayer as follows: “I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall. I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me. Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed, for 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.””
This is the model and pattern of lamenting that we will follow in our Service of Lament this Sunday, July 24th. I hope that you will join us in honestly bringing our pain before God and lamenting together. I hope that you will stand with us in solidarity with the Siau family who are walking through the “valley of the shadow of death” (Psalm 23:4). Come and lament with us.
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