Hopeful Sorrow: Lamenting Your Painਨਮੂਨਾ

What Is Lament?

Lament is defined as “a passionate expression of grief or sorrow,” and if this demonstrative form of prayer were an animal, it would not be domesticated. It’s not aimlessly crying over sorrow or making peace with despair, as despair is devoid of hope while lament demands it. Longing to see purpose produced from pain, one who laments believes God can bring good from excruciating evil meant to harm. Through brazen, goal-oriented language that implores God to act, one who laments fights the apathy of depression and unease of anxiety through hope and action. When loss pushes you to plumb the depths of grief, the one who laments fights the urge to turn away from God in despondency by turning toward Him in desperation.

Feeling despondent and yielding to despondency are different. Yielding to despondency is to make friends with it, essentially declaring your hope dead rather than living. We, brothers and sisters, don’t make peace with despondency; we make war. We stand strengthened by the Lord and engage in the good fight of faith by putting on the full armor of God. Along with that, we “pray at all times in the Spirit with every prayer and request, and stay alert with all perseverance and intercession for all the saints” (Ephesians 6:18, CSB).

Lament is the prayer language of perseverance in the midst of spiritual warfare as it calls on the God who fights for you to act on your behalf. Choosing despondency over declaring war is rooted in unbelief, because unbelief accepts defeat. Giving up in the fight for your faith is to allow sin to have dominion over you rather than choose to be governed by God’s grace. And God’s grace is seen in our ability to turn to Him in belief, often seen by the word but.

“My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart, my portion forever.” (Psalm 73:26, CSB)

Your health, your heart, and every circumstance in your life may fail, but your Father in heaven will not. Emotional health and maturity are not found in the absence of struggle, but through faith in the struggle. This very act of turning, which the use of but indicates, is the truest form of faith as that which is based on what we believe rather than what we see and feel. And not just turning to look at God, but turning to really see Him; to address Him in belief that He, in fact, does hear our prayers. But represents the resolve necessary to trust God even if your circumstances appear to oppose His loving-kindness.