Many churches and Christians don’t know what to do when someone’s life falls apart.

Imagine what that gap creates. What will happen when devastation hits? When a sudden, traumatic death occurs? When life as we know it is gone? What does the church have to offer?

Silence. Distance. Confusion. Fumbling attempts at cheering them up. Reminders of God’s goodness and faithfulness. Praise songs that celebrate Jesus’ victory over sin and death. Prayers of praise of thanks, of confession of sin, of supplication. Some good things. But good things at the wrong time are salt in the wound; an additional burden on top of the already burdened.

Most churches have a strange and noticeable absence of weeping, cries of lament, prayers filled with raw emotion, and songs expressing the tension that suffering highlights. Examples of said tension: if God is good, why did he say yes to this loss in my life? Why are you not intervening? Where are you, God? What else will you allow? How am I to trust you now?

This tension, these kinds of questions, are prevalent in the book of Psalms, as well as many other parts of the Old Testament. They’re even found in Jesus’ life. He laments over his people’s refusal to come to him (Matthew 23, Luke 13 & 19). The most striking one to me is Jesus’ quote of Psalm 22 on the cross. He is fully aware of the “why” of his suffering. He knows he needs to bear our sins, take God’s wrath, suffer and die. That awareness of why is something we do not have in our suffering. Yet Jesus still cries out, asking God his why. “Why have you forsaken me?”

People today would quickly respond to Jesus’ agonizing cry. “Why? Because you’re saving the world. You are atoning for our sin. This will lead to great victory over Satan, sin, and death. Remember why you are doing this and don’t question God!”

Most of us would vehemently reject the notion that we would respond to Jesus in this way. We wouldn’t be so insensitive or foolish to correct Jesus, would we? Or to ask him to shut up while he’s bearing such suffering? But that’s exactly what we do when our immediate response to God’s image bearers’ suffering is giving them reasons for their “why” and theological truths about God’s goodness and love.

I remember a few days after Mom died, someone texted me Bible verses from Isaiah and Psalms. Telling me how God keeps me in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you (Isaiah 26:3) and how my flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever (Psalm 73:26).

I was in the midst of significant trauma and heavy grief. The days and years loomed ahead with emptiness of life without her. My weeping was ongoing, tears soaked my pillow, sleep was elusive, nightmares were nightly. I still couldn’t yet name all the horrors we had endured. My husband is still hearing about them for the first time, over two years later. There is more, but I hope you get the idea. God had said yes to trauma, suffering, an ugly death, and ongoing difficulties in the years to come, and I was crushed underneath it. Trust God? How could I even begin to go there? I couldn’t even pray.

This person, while meaning well, did not know what I needed. At that point, I didn’t need reminders of God’s perfect peace, or that he is the strength of my heart. These seemed to try and silence the war building within me. Instead, I needed permission to wrestle with God. I had memorized those verses, those chapters, well before Mom was ever sick. I believed them. But instead of peace, God gave us trauma. God allowed terrible suffering for us. My heart was crying, “Who is this God who would do such a thing? Where is his hand in this? Why did he say yes to this?”

I needed to learn how to engage God with my questions and my emotions. I needed to learn it was right to bring them all to him. I needed to know he invites me to do so. I needed lament, and I needed people who were willing to give me space and time to wrestle.

While it’s true that God is the strength of our hearts and works all things for good, there is a time for everything (Ecclesiastes 3:4). A time to weep, and a time to laugh. A time to mourn, and a time to dance. During suffering, deep darkness, grief, loss, and tragedy, even in light of the truth that God is at work for our good, it is a time to weep and mourn. It is a time to lament.

This tension we experience when we don’t understand why God would say yes to such horrible circumstances is exactly where we need to be. It’s not time to try to resolve the tension. It’s time to lean in to it. It’s time to begin wrestling with God through these questions. It’s time to come to him with our raw cries of pain or anger or confusion. A friend of mine is writing a book about this very topic, using the first few chapters of Job as a guide. As soon as it’s available, I’ll recommend it to you. But until then, just note that in the book of Job, this tension takes center stage. And there is no resolution to it. Nowhere in the book do we see the reassurances we tend to give to someone in pain. They are true, but they are not fitting for times of sorrow.

When we try to rescue people from this tension, we produce people of shallow faith with little to offer anyone who is truly suffering. When we allow space for struggling with God through this tension, this process can produce a depth of faith that only comes out of deep pain. Michael Card calls this one of “the glories of wilderness and cross”

It is through wrestling with God in our sorrows that we can begin to gain what matters most: God himself. We must allow room for lament, for tears, for songs of sorrow, for honest cries and questions in our churches. Otherwise we drive hurting people away from the very process they need most: wrestling with God to begin to find the worth of of God.

There is a time for everything. We are good at the times of laughing and dancing. We need to make more space for times of weeping and mourning.

Michael Card does a wonderful job expounding this process in A Sacred Sorrow. I highly recommend it if you’re interested in learning more of the value of lament from Scripture. Let me end with a quote from page 30.

“Why then, does God enshrine so many laments in His Word? Laments, we must realize, are God’s Word. Why are so many biblical characters shown as disappointed and angry with God? Do we seek to learn from all the other facets of their lives but this? I would put it to you this way. People like Job, David, Jeremiah, and even Jesus reveal to us that prayers of complaint can still be prayers of faith. They represent the last refusal to let go of the God who may seem to be absent or worse – uncaring. If this is true, then lament expresses one of the most intimate moments of faith – not a denial of it. It is supreme honesty before a God whom my faith tells me I can trust. He encourages me to bring everything as an act of worship, my disappointment, frustration, and even my hate. Only lament uncovers this kind of new faith, a biblical faith that better understands God’s heart as it is revealed through Jesus Christ.”