There is something about how Sons of Korah sing the psalms, especially the laments, that raises the possibility of hope. Which raises the point yet again—something wholly unpopular that it repulses our human sensitivity.
Little wonder those who are perishing want nothing to do with God. But imagine if your misery was the key to your healing?
The polarising irony is the fact that, as far as many human moments of experience are concerned, we’re all perishing. Paradoxes win the order of the day: lament is the way to life.
There’s nothing quite like sitting in your sorrow, having no way of escaping it, and being there, experiencing the empathy of a God who heals us even as we cry out in anguish.
What that requires, however, is an image of a GOOD God; a God who is good ALL the time. Appreciate that God is wholly faithful and trustworthy, and through a long-felt lament is the healing that can come no other way. Please, I beg of you, imbibe this truth!
Yes, it makes absolutely no human sense. Some will read and say, “Rubbish!” But an enviable lament is this: it’s that experience in life that claims hope out of the jaws of despair, victory from the cusp of defeat, that grasps life from death. Honestly, there is such a thing; a never-more-certain thing through faith enough to trust God.
Nothing can crush us—and no attack of the enemy can threaten—when we embrace the grief that takes us to the envelope of overwhelm, where suffering burrows deep abysmally.
This is the very spiritual place of the Christ who clung most ardently to his Cross—knowing that in the calamity of death is the heralding of the eternal light that cannot be vanquished.
Lament is a very lost art. Only the psalmist, the mystic, the contemplative can attain to it, and yet as they do, they hold a precious secret any of us can partake of.
When we bear an enviable lament, patience becomes us, acceptance for things that cannot be changed overwhelms our reality—that, “The Serenity Prayer, wow Lord, I’m living it!!” Yet, it can’t be done unless we go there, trusting the truth of our lament to a God who is right there in it with us.
Do you see how all of life’s success BEGINS from such a point as this? Do you not sense that this is the beginning point; the New Thing that God has come to show us.
It took until we were grieving in the grave of our despair to come closer than ever to the abundant life that’s achievable only through lament.
Imagine being so honest with God and anyone else who would listen, so authentic as to sing a song of Psalm 88, if that’s your reality. Isn’t God great to have honoured lament so well in the Psalms, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes and the prophets, and in Jesus and in Paul?
There’s no ‘name it, claim it’ prosperity doctrine in the two thousand pages of the Bible. That’s a recent idolatrous ‘gospel’.
Instead, we have the riches of the glories of the graces of the Cross. Amid the enemy’s finest moment comes his cataclysmic pulverising defeat. And the same fits with our lament.
When we find ourselves sitting content in lament—which just sounds idiotic—hating the fact that we cannot master our destiny—we find, in a moment, we have mastered our destiny.
Truly the people of God in the book of Acts were those who could praise God at any time. Only when we’ve learned to lament, to repent from our denial and raging against God, can we come close to a peace that can only come from within.
An enviable lament is a thing. It’s a thing that makes no earthly sense. But it will capture the imagination of those who are watching on. An enviable lament is a witness to the glory of God that resurrects a human even when that human is travailing in depths deep of hurt.
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I don’t want anyone to be under a false misapprehension. Lament is suffering, but it’s not glorying (enjoying) suffering. It’s simply the acceptance that any good place beyond it is through it, not around it. This is victory for the acceptance of something that cannot be changed. It’s acceptance because we have dropped our claims as to the injustice of life.
It’s a very countercultural idea for this time in history but test it and find that it is biblical.
We have fallen for a truth that isn’t true; that easy and comfortable is best. Clearly it isn’t. We need reminding regularly, opening the Bible and turning its many difficult pages, that there is always something beyond the pain of now.
I’d commend you to the opening words of Paul in 2 Corinthians 1:3-7.
Praise to the God of All Comfort
3 “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, 4 who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. 5 For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ. 6 If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer. 7 And our hope for you is firm, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort.”
Image: Sarah Wickham
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