Hurting people are given permission to grieve, but not aimlessly or selfishly. The biblical language of lament is able to redirect weeping people to what is true despite the valley they are walking through. I long for the experience of personal and corporate lament to be multiplied. How many Christians need to learn to lament? How many need to have their thinking redirected?
How much of this is just personal experience? Like, this is just what happened when I did have genuine faith in God, did believe him, and also walked thru it. (Mom, Dad, CSA)
You’re just constrained. You don’t have any other choice but to turn to him and believe he’s doing good for his own glory and our good, even amidst it. And you have to acknowledge that you might never get to see the good.
I don’t know that anyone but the Holy Spirit and circumstance can actually teach this. It has to be worked out in the heart.
I can say to Erin a million times that this is how God expects her to grieve, how she can be blessed in her grief over Ben’s health, AND IT CAN BE TRUE, AND she can never actually experience it because the faith isn’t there - not said as an indictment, but as a statement of fact. And if the faith isn’t there, then there is never that trust that God is and that he rewards those who diligently seek him and that that reward will be peace amidst the hurt which may never dissipate.
So I think yes, I need to learn this a spiritual discipline, but like all spiritual disciplines, it could be a means of grace to faith for some, and for others it could be an empty form which they later come to resent when they “realize” God isn’t real later in their life, because their faith was contingent upon their circumstances resolving and it never happened.
I think this is a lot of what I’m reading now on deconstruction places. It isn’t that people didn’t have language for lament. Faith naturally cries these things out to God.
It’s that questions were shut down, grief was silenced and forced to be smiley, or took too long, or said too many unacceptable or improper things, and those of tender faith were tossed aside and/or continued to be abused. The evil wasn’t stopped by those who had the power and responsibility to do so! How then will those they led to faith be able to trust the God they preached and lament?? This is silicon a bigger problem than just the individual grieving life circumstance, although it certainly includes that. How much trouble did I have trusting that God is good through Mom’s sickness as a DIRECT consequence of my interactions with my father, who weaponized scripture to get his way and make me his servant? And how much more confusing for the parishioners whose pastors treated them in this way??
To then go on and preach lamenting as the solution and to assume that trust still be given to the same institutions and pastors and that all the people need to know is how to lament and take their selfish pain and direct it to God “in the proper way” is just an extension of the same abuses to people like my sister. And probably my brother as well.
I don’t know that grief can follow a formula. And also. I believe that lament is the natural progression of grief for the Christian who has the Holy Spirit.
It’s like catechism etc - I’m not sure how much you can make people learn.
