Two years ago, one of the places I was eagerly serving in our church was our music ministry. I had been involved for almost eight years. While some call music ministry worship, I will use the term “worship” more broadly, as worship entails more than singing. I played keys, sang occasionally, and was learning guitar. I loved it. Whether on stage or in a pew, I would eagerly sing the songs in our repertoire. My heart agreed with the words. Music has been a part of me as long as I can remember, and my kids will attest that I believe life is a musical.

Then my mom got sick. Diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, and after a traumatic five months of treatment with me as her primary caregiver, she was dead. And my life as I knew it shattered.

During that time, I experienced a jarring shift. All of a sudden, everything in my life was different. With music ministry in particular, I could not sing anymore. My voice was physically capable; my heart was not. At church, the music became shallow. I had listened to Christian radio before. I could not do it anymore. My heart was ruptured. Emotionally, physically, spiritually I was bleeding out. And none of the songs I heard on Sundays or in the car echoed my agonized cries for God.

“Where are you? Why did you let Mom suffer so much? We obeyed you and you crushed our family. I’m crying every hour, every day. I can’t sleep. The trauma wakes me up, or sometimes the grief. My body feels it, and is wasting away. I don’t want to eat. If you love me, why did you give me this? If you love me and can give us so much suffering, what else are you going to give me? I’m left alone. No one understands. I am surrounded by miserable comforters. If life is full of this much sorrow and ugliness, I don’t know that I want to keep living it. I am so angry! How could you take her away when there was so much more life to live? We need her here, God. How much longer are you going to beat us down? This isn’t getting better. The burden is still so heavy. How much longer do we have to struggle?”

These are just a few of the honest heart cries I was aching to express. But since these cries were not present in Christian music, circles, teachings, or relationships, I thought they were wrong. They must mean I have weak faith. Since I was so rocked by the season, I must be doing something wrong. Strong faith in God means being able to sing with confidence about God’s goodness, and being able to rejoice during my loss. Right?

Wrong. I was dead wrong. And thank God he didn’t leave me there. He gave me guides: grieving friends & authors, grieving artists, and most of all, his Word. God used all of these guides to right my incomplete theology I had picked up from Christian culture about grief. I learned how God also feels incredibly strong emotions. He laments and grieves. He also understand the condition of the fallen human heart and invites our cries, our theologically incorrect anguish, our anger, our broken hearts. Unlike so much of our culture, he wants it. He wants the ugly. He wants us to bring him all of it. He draws near to the brokenhearted. That is where transformation begins. That is how faith deepens. The darkest parts of our lives is where God’s greatest work happens.

In the book of Psalms, I heard my cries. I remember the first time reading Psalm 6 after Mom died, and bursting into tears in the first few verses. The writer’s cries were my cries. I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t crazy. The relief was profound, and the comfort in those tears was real. God saw me. He heard. And he knew I needed to cry my cries to him.

Seeing God lament to Jeremiah was another profound moment to me. God hurts. He hurts deeply. More deeply than I was ever aware before. So if God hurts, and expresses it, and he is without sin, so may I hurt and express it, though I will certainly not be without sin until my remaking is complete. I could also mention Habakkuk, Job, David, Ezekiel, Jesus in the New Testament, and others. Our Bible is filled with suffering and the human response to it. Should not our music also be?

Tim Keller preached multiple sermons that freed me up to be raw and unfiltered in my cries to God. “Praying Our Anger,” “Praying Our Doubts”, “Praying our Tears” and “Praying Our Fears” gave me more Scriptural evidence that God wants all of me. Here are just a few of the honest cries from the Bible that echoed my bleeding heart and moved me toward God in my grief:

• “He has walled me about so that I cannot escape; he has made my chains heavy; though I call and cry for help, he shuts out my prayer; he has blocked my ways with blocks of stones; he has made my paths crooked.” Lamentations 3:7-9
• “I did not sit in the company of revelers, nor did I rejoice; I sat alone, because your hand was upon me, for you had filled me with indignation. Why is my pain unceasing, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed? Will you be to me like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail?” Jeremiah 15:17-18.
• “I am weary with my moaning; every night I flood my bed with tears; I drench my couch with my weeping. My eye wastes away because of grief; it grows weak because of all my foes.” Psalm 6: 6-7
• “In the day of my trouble I seek the Lord; in the night my hand is stretched out without wearying; my soul refuses to be comforted. When I remember God, I moan; when I meditate, my spirit faints. You hold my eyelids open; I am so troubled that I cannot speak. I consider the days of old, the years long ago. I said, “let me remember my song in the night, let me meditate in my heart.” Then my spirit made a diligent search: “Will the Lord spurn forever, and never again be favorable? Has his steadfast love forever ceased? Are his promises at an end for all time? Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has he in anger shut up his compassion?” Psalm 77:4-9

There are many more, but just to give you an idea of what my soul was and still is crying. These aren’t what we tend to hear on Sundays or put on our wall hangings, are they? Yet they are and should be a precious and vital part of our diet as Christians.

One pastor I knew noted the importance of music ministry. He said that people don’t leave a Sunday service reciting the sermon; they leave singing the worship songs. This is why music ministry is crucial to theological formation. Much of what we believe is caught, not taught. Unfortunately, the vast majority of Christian music unintentionally teaches an incomplete, shallow theology. It teaches a praise-heavy response to God, which feels like a diet of cotton candy to a deeply grieving person. It’s shallow. From my new perspective, these primarily positive songs are true of God. For example, yes, God is a way-maker and miracle worker, a promise-keeper and light in the darkness. Yes, he is our living hope. But if that is all we sing, we give no direction or example to the bleeding heart of how they should approach God in their sorrow. We imply instead that they should be able to sing these types of songs in their pain, and if they can’t, the problem is with them. Positive praise without the devastating sorrow is unbalanced, and unrealistic. Music ministry in churches must include lament in the same language as the Bible does. It is striking that so much of Israel’s songbook was made up of laments. Cries to God in their anguish, in the injustice, in their deserved punishment, in their undeserved sorrow. We need songs that also say things like, “How long? Why have you crushed me? Where is your hand, because I don’t see it?”

It is not only the songs. It is the leaders. Worship leaders need to not only know how to praise but how to mourn. If not, they will continually put Christian bows on painful realities that instead need the grace of lament. Even if a church begins to introduce lament into their liturgies, if the worship leaders do not know the sacredness and importance of lament, they will naturally lighten what needs to be weighty, or cheer those who need to be sad. This brings unintentional harm to the already wounded. If worship leaders don’t lament, they must first and most importantly admit they don’t know how to lament. I firmly believe one can learn how to do so. They must humble themselves to listen to those who have wrestled with God in their unbearable pain. They must study what God says about lament, perhaps starting with Lamentations and Psalms. They must begin to ask the hard questions and be willing to be uncomfortable. They must learn to wrestle with God. They must be okay with the process of grief, and the undone nature of struggle. They must listen to the lessons and the deepness of faith God gives them through their own wrestling. In short, they must be willing to grow more like Christ. As the end of Romans 8:17 says, “…provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.”

Once I began to learn this language of lament, life started showing up. I could see God at work. Most importantly, I knew his presence with me. He drew near when others shied away. He let me be messy without slapping a theologically correct answer on my aching heart. It’s not a science. God does not operate based on a formula. My experience will be different from another’s experience with God due to the uniqueness of who we are as people. Yet I believe the constancy that is true for all of us is that when we open the door to grief and pain, and learn to direct it to God, he meets us and does the miracle of bringing life from death. I’m still grieving. I still can’t sing on Sunday mornings. I still ask “why”. I still wrestle with God. I will probably never be done this side of eternity. I don’t have all the answers. But I have him. Lament to God in my life-shattering sorrow has brought me more of God. More presence. Deeper faith. More intentionality with life. More empathy and compassion for the hurting. More anger with the sin and brokenness around me. More pain, yes. And praise Jesus, more glory.