Kindle Notes & Highlights
“The absence of lament in the American Christian church has resulted in a noticeable theological gap and a failure to engage the full breadth and depth of biblical Christian faith.
Lament is the spiritual discipline needed by the church and this text offers an essential guide for this long-lost spiritual practice.”
—Soong-Chan Rah,
And lament is not about giving up on God. It is a cry of anguish reaching out to a personal and trustworthy God.
Lament is rooted deeply in the Jewish tradition out of which Christianity emerges.
In that project, I defined lament as “a persistent cry for salvation to the God who promises to save, in a situation of suffering or sin, in the confident hope that this God hears and responds to cries, and acts now and in the future to make whole. In other words, lament calls upon God to keep God’s own promises.”1
Even learning to lament for ourselves can take some practice.
Likewise lamenting for others, especially those who are different from us, might take some practice. One
There are more psalms of lament than any other type of psalm.
Lament is not a polite type of prayer. It’s designed for wrestling with God. It’s urgent, anguished, demanding. Come down!
Lament takes wordless, almost unbearable pain, and gives it a shape and a voice.
The first step of lament is directing the cry somewhere.
To name something is to know it, which is not always easy. As Joel Willitts writes, “What is not named is not healed.”1
For many Old Testament laments, one of the primary complaints is the absence or hiddenness of God.
When things fall apart, when the center does not seem to hold, when the pain seems too great to bear, how could God possibly still be present and paying attention?
Lament makes room for the gap between the truth (God never leaves us) and our experience (it sure feels like God does, sometimes). Lament gives a voice to our worst fears and doubts and invites us to say them out loud. It even invites us to speak them to God—even toward a God we may be angry with, or doubtful toward.
Allen Verhey used to say that’s what distinguishes lament from despair—even at its bleakest, even when Job curses God and asks to die, lament is still a prayer, which means it still turns toward God, even if it only turns toward God to shake a fist.4 Job “clings to God against God.”
Simply sitting still to listen without interrupting can be a great gift.
that God’s silence in the book of Lamentations can be read not as anger or indifference but as “a moment of deep respect for Daughter Zion to pour out her full lament.”
