As we recover the practice of lament, we will meditate on the fourth and final movement of lament: confess your trust.
Confess Your Trust
Finally, a confession of trust in God acknowledges that, even if the answer to our prayer is unknown, God is trustworthy, whatever the circumstances.
David declares, “I will declare your name to my people” (Ps 22:22) and “I trust in your unfailing love” (Ps 13:5) as he brings his psalms to a close, even when an immediate resolution is not found. And yet Psalm 88 doesn’t conclude this way. While the psalmist cannot bring himself to declare praise as the climax of his song, he has already acknowledged “the God who saves”.
Sometimes we need a form of prayer that would help us turn to God, honestly name our suffering while appealing for God to hear and respond with comfort and help, and counsel us to confess our trust. May the psalms of lament be a guide for your prayers in the difficult moments you face.
As we recover the practice of lament, we will meditate on the third movement of lament: appeal for God to hear and respond.
Appeal for God to Hear and Respond
Laments don’t end with complaints. The third movement is an appeal for God to hear and respond.
The grounds for this appeal is God’s word; his character and his promises. Even in the darkness of Psalm 88, the psalmist appeals to a God who hears—“May my prayer come before you; turn your ear to my cry” (Ps 88:2).
David similarly appeals to God: “Look on me and answer, Lord my God” (Ps 13:3). As we lament, we not only express our difficulties to God, but we call upon him to hear us in our moment of need—knowing that he alone is our source of comfort, hope and help.
As people living after Jesus’ death and resurrection, our prayers of lament are now anchored in what we believe and know to be true about the character and promises of God revealed in Christ. We can know of God’s faithfulness to save us and meet us in the depths of our cries even more than the psalmists.
As we recover the practice of lament, we will meditate on the second movement of lament: cry out your complaint.
Cry Out Your Complaint
After turning to God, each of these psalms cries out with a complaint—a defining characteristic of lament. This involves naming the problem being seen or experienced and expressing it vividly before God. That might sound untrusting, perhaps even ungodly. But this is far from unbelief or ungodliness—this is a righteous response to the wrongfulness of life’s circumstances. It’s a refusal to wish away suffering, stiffen our upper lip or “be strong” in the face of sin and suffering.
We see this in Psalm 13 when David cries out to God when he seems absent in his life:
How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? (Psalm 13:1-2).
Again, David feels distance from God in Psalm 22 and questions why he is forsaken (Ps 22:1-2)—words which Jesus himself takes up as his own on the cross (Mt 27:46). In Psalm 88, the psalmist expresses a sense of grief that is evidently unbearable:
You have put me in the lowest pit, in the darkest depths … my eyes are dim with grief. (Ps 88:6-9).
Crying out our complaints with heart-wrenching honesty is not only okay—but godly.
Psalms of lament show us that crying out our complaints with heart-wrenching honesty is not only okay—but godly. Even in the depths of the pit, the loss of a loved one, or a moment of despair—God anticipates and hears each of our cries.
The doctor confirms your fears: the cancer has returned. Or your hope is crushed by the news of a miscarriage. For some of us, it’s rising to a new day only to be met by the dark and familiar clouds of depression. You mourn the disclosure from a friend that they’ve been abused. Or perhaps it’s arriving home to tell your family that you’ve lost your job: hopes dim, and anxiety rises. Maybe it’s the toll of war, flood waters raging and constant destruction that fills your newsfeed. In moments like these, how would God have us pray?
Through lamentation. God has given us a model of prayer for these exact situations—the ones that hurt the most. In fact, this kind of prayer saturates large portions of the Scriptures. It’s more than forty per cent of Psalms; the central theme of the book of Lamentations; and is modeled for us by Jesus when he cries out from the cross, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”
This form of prayer is called lament: the honest expression of our sorrows to God. And tragically, lament has been lost from the vocabulary of many of us today.
Lament has long been the practice of the people of God when they’re at the end of themselves. It’s also how God himself grieved the injustices of this world when he walked among us in the person of Jesus.
Lament is a practice that we need to recover. As we round out these final days in the Season of Asking in Prayer, we will meditate on the four movements of lament: turning to God, cry out your complaint, appeal for God to hear and respond, and confess your trust.
Turn to God
The first feature of lament is an address to God. The direction of the prayer matters here; it’s not grumbling to others—it’s intentionally coming before God in prayer. Anyone can cry, grumble and complain—but only the righteous offer their cries, grumbles and complaints as prayers to the Living God. The difference between the two is the direction. Notice how this is expressed in the opening verses of these three psalms;
“How long, LORD?” (Psalm 13:1)
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1)
“LORD, you are the God who saves me; day and night I cry out to you.” (Psalm 88:1)
Psalm 13 and 22 begin by bringing a question before God, Psalm 88 with an acknowledgement of the salvation God offers. But did you catch the common thread?
They all turn to God first.
Come Holy Spirit, help us turn our hearts to You today.
Brian McLaren, Center for Action and Contemplation, identifies how prayers of petition help us to experience forgiveness:
Since being wounded or sinned against is a terribly common experience, I suspect we need to pay more attention to it. In fact, being wronged is directly linked in the Lord’s Prayer to the reality of doing wrong; we pray, “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.”
Father Richard Rohr says it well: Pain that isn’t processed is passed on. Pain that isn’t transformed is transmitted. So we need to process our woundedness with God, and that processing begins by naming the pain and holding it … in God’s presence:
It’s important not to rush this process. We need to feel our feelings, to let the pain actually catch up with us…. I’ve found that it takes less energy to feel and process my pain than it does to suppress it or run away from it. So, just as through confession we name our own wrongs and feel regret, through petition we name and feel the pain that results from the wrongs of others…. We translate our pain into requests:
It’s important to note that we are not naming what we need the person who wronged us to do for us. If we focus on what we wish the antagonist would do to make us feel better, we unintentionally arm the antagonist with still more power to hurt us. Instead, in this naming, we are turning from the antagonist to God, focusing on what we need God to do for us. We’re opening our soul to receive healing from God’s ever present, ever generous Spirit.
For physical suffering and sickness. Draw near to us God in our infirmity; may the limitations of our human bodies teach us to rely more and more on You.
For the ways in which we’ve been wounded by others. Loving God, we know that you hear the cries of those who have been mistreated, harmed, and oppressed.
For the grief we carry with us. Comfort us in our mourning and console us with the hope of the resurrection.
For mental and emotional anguish. Send your Spirit to renew our minds and soothe the often unseen pain hidden within our hearts.
For moments of suffering when we have felt alone or abandoned. Surround us with your presence, reminding us of your constant care even in times of darkness.
Happiness is hidden in suffering, redemptive, and transformational.
Life is not black and white. When we find ourselves standing on one side or another of an issue or a situation, we have assumed the role of judge, a role that is not ours. We are challenged to show no partiality , to make no distinctions in life, for we cannot truly know the heart and mind of another. While difficult to do, we are called to look with love on all those we meet and pray for God’s blessings to fall upon them. As you go through this day, pause and reflect on the issues you face and strive to be a voice of reason, calm, and patience, showing a path of love to God and neighbor.
God of compassion, you are the true judge of what is good and evil. Free us from the temptation to pass judgment on ourselves and others, so that we may live more fully as your sons and daughters. Through Christ our Lord, amen
Another way of explaining intercession is standing in the gap between God and the person you are praying for. In Ezekiel 22:29-30, God lamented “I looked for someone among them who would build up the wall and stand before me in the gap on behalf of the land so I would not have to destroy it, but I found no one.”
The need to stand in the gap before God is as urgent now as it was six hundred years before Christ. The heart of the true intercessor knows no boundaries; they are able to pray “for all men, for kings and all who are in high positions, for persecutors, for the salvation of those who reject the Gospel” (CCC 2636)
Lord, show me who You want me to stand in the gap for today. When I tell someone I’m going to pray for them, help me know what and when to pray. Thank You God for trusting me to stand in the gap for a vulnerable one whom You have given me to protect and defend in prayer. Amen
Why do we pray? If God already knows what we need before we ask, and God actually cares about us more than we care about ourselves, then why do we have to ask, receive, seek, find, (Matthew 7:7)? This is the mystery of asking. Prayer is a symbiotic relationship with life and with God, a synergy which creates a result larger than the exchange itself. We ask not to change God, but to change ourselves. We pray to form a living relationship, not to get things done. We need to pray to keep the symbiotic relationship moving and growing. Prayer is not a way to try to control God, or even to get what we want.
Prayers of intercession or petition are one way of situating our life within total honesty and structural truth. We are all forever beggars before God and the universe. We can never engineer or guide our own transformation or conversion. If we try, it will be a self-centered and well-controlled version of conversion, with most of our preferences still fully in place, but now well-disguised. We must “humbly ask God to remove our shortcomings.” It’s important that we ask, seek, and knock to keep ourselves in the right relationship with Life Itself.
Life is a gift, totally given to us without cost, every day of it, and every part of it. A daily and chosen “attitude of gratitude” will keep our hands open to expect that life, allow that life, and receive that life at ever-deeper levels of satisfaction—but never to think we deserve it.
O Mighty God, Help this world to know what is wrong and what is right. Provide peace and hope to those who are suffering from injustice. Show them that you are there, and you care for them and that you will make all things right. God, I pray for a world full of love and compassion.
We can mis-live life. All it takes is the consistent application of mediocrity, laziness, procrastination, obsession with material possessions, and self-centeredness. Let’s pray for the Holy Spirit to guide our hands and be safe in God’s tower of goodness.
Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the universe who is good and bestows good, let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us and establish the work of our hands upon us, establish the work of our hands.
Proverbs 18:10, tells us that the name of the Lord is a strong tower; and the righteous man runs into it and is safe.
Smitten With Goodness 