I can tell you it’s very often I get to sit down after a long day or evening and seriously contemplate how hard life is. The Christian life is not the victory that a lot of Christians would have it be. No, it is hard and yet in the facing of our truth, in the hardness of it all, somehow in not reaching out for an anesthetising drink or drug or food or flutter, we’re somehow met by God, even as continue to face our pain.
This is lament... and it is biblical. Somehow as we strive not to strive, as we sit in the realities we cannot change, God meets us there, amid the centrality of a lament that will neither deny nor disparage, and in THAT God starts to heal us.
Yes, I know, it is probably a very unimpressive theology. It doesn’t hold out to you some unreachable theology that is unattainable for the many. It doesn’t privilege the experience of miracles to the few. It doesn’t herald special ones for having ‘special’ gifts.
But lament in and of itself, even the willingness to go there, is a rare gift, for who will willingly suffer as the Christ suffered? “God has a university,” Gene Edwards says in The Tale of Three Kings, “... it’s a small school. Few enroll; even fewer graduate. Very, very few indeed.” Our living God offers undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in brokenness. His lecturers are Joseph and David and Job and Jeremiah and Jesus and Paul. A whole litany of biblical exemplars. We don’t graduate in these degrees like we typically graduate — God’s degrees are eternal (ref. 2 Corinthians 4:16-18). The truth is, we’re not meant to master life.
Even more than ever there is less willingness to enter the sacred faculty of lament, however. This world for too long has promised too much, and we have bargained our way on a false hope, completely missing God into the bargain. We barely see that it is in our lack that we are to see that there is nothing lacking in God. The life of lament that any of us can live, an invitation never starker than in this COVID-19 season, beckons upon the altar call of Psalm 23.
It is only when we have nothing that we truly realise we have everything in God. It is a blessing, therefore, to you have everything ripped out from under us, if only we will try God out to this degree; to trust the Lord to the extension of entering our brokenness, as if we have nothing to lose, because what is hidden in the heart of God is we have everything to gain via entering it. We fear losing that which holds us away from gaining everything.
Psalm 23 never ascends to the heights of our imagination until we read it within the chasm of spiritual poverty; the truth of this Psalm is forever withheld from us until we read it through the eyes of the broken.
God wants to know if any of us would have the compunction to truly live as Jesus lived; a life of going without; a life of lament for the unseen spiritual treasures in the heavenly realms; that’s right, we sow these blessings up by going without. Not very popular or ‘practical’ these days — in a day where we judge everything by whether it works or not!
The true hope of the gospel is not in denying our pain, nor fighting it, running from it, nor pretending that life’s sweet. The true hope of the gospel is found in the very place we hate to imagine exists; by facing it, by looking at it, by peering into it, by embracing it, by loving it.
Try this. Achieve victory without adversity. Experience life without lament. There is no such thing in this life.
It is only through resisting anger, through embracing patience, that we learn patience, by saying ‘no’ to anger. It is only through resisting greed, through embracing generosity, that we learn generosity, by saying ‘no’ to greed. It is only through resisting pride, through embracing humility, that we learn humility, by saying ‘no’ to pride. It is like this through the corpus of all the challenges of this life. It is a most inconvenient truth; yet it’s a truth all the same, unabashed in its wisdom.
It’s a truth that never goes away, and it remains there ever to be faced for what it is. To enter pain where it is, to enter reality however hard it is, is to enter the mature life, and nothing of that can harm us. Indeed, it can only set us on the road to freedom.
It is wisdom to go its way. It is God’s university. It’s a curriculum of brokenness. Come.
Photo by Matt Cannon on Unsplash
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