Lifting Up Lament
Beloved People of God,
We’ve been to the moon, amazing 238,855 miles from earth! A few months ago, astronauts circled the moon again, and it was hailed as a great achievement. And it is! But every time we step out into space or live for protracted periods of time on the International Space Station, I can’t help but remember that we’ve yet to reach the bottom of the ocean’s depth in the Mariana Trench. We’ve soared hundreds of thousands of miles into space, but we haven’t been able to get past 7.6 miles deep. It’s as if we’re good at going out, but not that great at going in.
This is true of our lives. We’re adept at looking out around us. We find it easy to make external observations about others, but turning that gaze inward…that’s a different story. The tools we have to explore our own inner world are severely lacking. The pressure we feel as we swim down into our motivations is immense. Our best tools melt as we dig into the deepest places of our souls.
Eugene Peterson once said that our prayers are tools. They aren’t tools “for doing or getting, but for being and becoming.” I think he’s right. We need better tools than the ones we’ve created in order to plum deeper into our inner spaces. When we turn to Scripture, we are given one such tool, one that we’re less inclined to use because of what we think it will cost us. The Bible equips us with the prayer tool of lament (and sadly most of us have to be desperate before we choose to wield it), but when we do, we discover it was the very thing we needed to break through. Embraced in the grace of lament, we find the prayer tool we’ve been searching for. Lament gives us the freedom to speak honestly with God, pointedly asking Him to respond in keeping with His character. Delayed as we are putting on airs, pretending piety before the Lord and others, lament allows us to wrestle with God in the mud of our deepest hurt, anger, and confusion.
Friend, God through His word invites to you deeper. Use the prayer tool of lament.
For Christ the King,
Brett