Tag: Jesus

Our world seems to be filled with darkness and strife.  People seem to be focused on their own desires and will do anything to achieve them. Individualism prevails breading our disconnection from relationship hence our high rates of loneliness and anxiety in the United States. 

Praise God there is a kingdom that does not belong to the “world.” The “world” is the realm of sin, selfishness, hatred, and violence.  The kingdom is full of kindness, generosity, mercy, justice and love.

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.

Come Holy Spirit, help us trust You today.

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.

Come Holy Spirit, hear our hearts today.

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: 

Betrayed. Insulted. Taken advantage of. Lied to. Forgotten. Used. Abused. Belittled. Passed over. Cheated. Mocked. Snubbed. Robbed. Vandalized. Misunderstood. Misinterpreted. Excluded. Disrespected. Ripped off. Confused. Misled.  

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:  

Comfort. Encouragement. Reassurance. Companionship. Vindication. Appreciation. Boundaries. Acknowledgement.  

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.