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Easter For A Bereaved Daughter

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It has been almost two years since Mom died. Never having gone through this intense of a loss, I don’t know what to expect. As the church builds their anticipation toward Easter this year, I find myself increasingly frustrated and hurt by the imbalance (more on that later). So much victory, so little heartbreak. Where do I belong?

Our worship band tends to pull out “Easter Sunday” songs before the actual day in order to get the congregation familiar with them. Revving the engine, so to speak. I know. I used to be part of it. It never bothered me before. After grief, worship music is different. One song in particular has rubbed me the wrong way: Dead Things Come Alive by Brandon Lake, Chris Brown and Elevation Worship. It’s a gloriously positive song, highlighting that Jesus is a healer, savior, all-powerful, the one who crushes the serpent’s head, the one with dominion over death. Yes and amen. I believe that. The end of the song repeats these couple things: “Where, oh death, is now your sting? And where, oh grave, your victory?” This quotes 1 Corinthians 15:55. The other refrain repeated is “Dead things come alive in the name of Jesus.”

All true statements. All things I believe and are great cause for hope as a Christian. But it’s incomplete. It’s out of balance. It’s overwhelming victory with little to no grief. I can already hear the argument: “But there’s the Good Friday service.” Yes, there is. One time a year we allow ourselves to look at sin’s effect on us and the world, and to grieve it. Once a year. That is, if our church allows a minor key service for Good Friday. Some can’t hold the tension even on that day, and put in victorious worship songs. Assuming we do it well, once a year is not enough. It is a symptom of our pain-avoidance as a church that we cannot grieve, mourn, weep and lament together on a regular basis. The lament psalms are around a third of Israel’s public praise songs. We are not even close to that. It’s a great miss, considering how much difficulty and pain we walk through in this life.

C.S. Lewis also experienced this death-aversion, and had this to say in A Grief Observed. “It is hard to have patience with people who say ‘There is no death’ or ‘Death doesn’t matter.’ There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn’t matter. I look up at the night sky. Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch? She died. She is dead. Is the word so difficult to learn?”

We celebrate births, and ask how the mother and father and child are doing as he/she grows. We check in, we celebrate milestones. We know that life matters. When someone dies, we don’t know what to do. We get uncomfortable. After the funeral, we never mention that person’s name. We don’t check in on how the bereaved are doing. We don’t recognize milestones or anniversaries. We don’t remember the dead in our services or conversations. We don’t sing their grief. We don’t pray their groans. Perhaps your church does. Most do not.

I was in a GriefShare group when our worship band began rehearsing that song. Over and over, I could hear “Dead things come alive in the name of Jesus” while we were grappling with the pain of our mother/daughter/wife/father’s death. The irony was not lost on me. While some people can worship to that song, it hit me like an arrow in the heart. What I heard was, “Dead things come alive in the name of Jesus, except your mom. Maybe you didn’t pray in the name of Jesus enough.” Another part of me fought back and said, “No, dead things don’t come alive. Not now. I know my mother will rise again, but dead things also stay dead. For years.”

It wouldn’t be as painful to hear this song if we would actually acknowledge the sting death brings in the present. But all we do now is celebrate that death has no victory or sting. Then what is this agony inside me? Jesus never meant for us to live only celebrating. Faith and tears coexist. Trust can look like bringing doubts and questions to God. Weeping does not mean there is no hope. Can not both be true? Can’t we weep over death while believing there is resurrection coming? I can weep with great sorrow because my mom is dead, while trusting God will raise her from the dead. I can ache and ask God all my questions while believing his promises are true.

1 Corinthians 15 was written to some people who didn’t believe there was a resurrection of the dead. Paul was writing to convince and explain to them what is true of Jesus’ death and resurrection and what will be true of us when we rise. Our church context today has no trouble remembering we will rise again, but spends almost no time mourning or grieving death, disappointment and loss. The grave is empty, but we’re not sad it was filled in the first place. We’re out of balance, and that alienates people who are deeply grieving. More than that, it hurts the church, who is not equipped to walk through great trials, who don’t mourn the things God mourns, and who have no deep comfort to offer those whose lives have blown up. It’s a shallow worship when we don’t weep over our Lazarus’ death. 1 Corinthians 15:55 was not written so people would not mourn. It was written so that they could “stand firm” and “let nothing move you (1 Corinthians 15:58). It was written so they could continue on in their faith.

Sometimes faith is celebration. Sometimes it is weeping with great sorrow. Sometimes is it living with a continual ache, with part of you missing until you meet Jesus yourself. That’s a long time to wait. And living with that deep ache is exactly what your victorious Savior is an expert in. He not only rose from the dead, he suffered. He groaned. He wept. He lamented. He knew grief intimately and deeply. He knows your story and walks through every moment of it with you. Yes, on Easter Sunday, many people’s expectations of worship will be rejoicing with loud singing, smiles, hands raised, celebrating the victory of Jesus’ resurrection. Your Easter offering may be tears, weeping, aching, and groaning, seeking to continue on when the weight is heavy. Even if the church doesn’t recognize your weeping and groaning as worship, Jesus does. He sees it, and it honors him. It’s a beautiful Easter offering.

Music as a Ministry

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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.

What Do We Do With the “No”?

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One night, a previous pastor of mine texted a group of friends from our church. His wife was in the emergency room. It wasn’t looking good. He reached out for prayer. Of course we all prayed for healing, for strength, for God’s will to be done. The husband reached out with updates, saying her health was improving. “It looks like God is answering our prayers,” he typed.

I love and respect this man. I understand what he was saying. What he was really saying was, “It looks like God is saying yes to what we are asking.” His choice of words is a common one in Christian circles. “It looks like God is answering our prayers” is a typical response when God works according to our will, or more bluntly, when we get what we want. However, it reinforces a damaging and warped theology of God, prayer and suffering. What if her health didn’t improve? What if this was the end of her life? Would it look like God was answering our prayers then? What do we do?

Over a year ago, our family was reeling from my mom’s exploding health issues. It was cancer. It was advanced. Later we were to find it was stage 4. The Sunday before her surgery, we asked for prayer from our pastors at church. We, too, prayed for healing. Over the next months of surgery, treatment and decline, we prayed. She wasn’t healed. Six months after diagnosis, we held her hands and sat by her bedside, watching her spirit exit her cancer-ravaged body. What about her? What about the prayers that went up on her behalf for her healing and restoration? Did God answer our prayers?

I firmly believe he did answer. He always answers. He told us, “No.” He declined our request for this cancer to be removed. In my mom’s words in her final days, “Cancer has owned me.” God answered. It was not the answer we wanted.

You may argue with me that God does not cause evil. He did not give my mom cancer. I agree with you. But the nuance here, which we find in the Psalms of lament, is the understanding of God’s ultimate responsibility of our tragedies. He could have intervened. He was certainly able to heal her. But He did not. At the end of the day, God is responsible.

This creates a most serious conundrum. This is a problem. One of the most important, vital issues human beings have with God today. Many people call it “the problem of pain and suffering”. You most likely have heard it (or like me, have said it) something like this: “If God is good, why would he allow such a terrible thing to happen?” This can be a lively issue to debate. Until it happens to you. Or someone you love. Then it hits home. We can’t understand it. When suffering hits us, the theological arguments turn into this problem. We can’t think of a possible good reason for such devastation. We struggle to reconcile a good God with our tragedy.

(By the way, this post isn’t the proper place to really dive into the philosophical legwork needed with such a question, but if you’re interested in it, the best work I’ve read and listened to up to this point in my life is by Timothy Keller. One option is “Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering”, but he has also preached multiple sermons on the topic, available through Gospel in Life. I am forever grateful to him for his work on suffering.)

This discord we feel when pain and loss hit our lives is not new, and is part of being human. The questions, doubts, anger, fear and distress the deeply suffering feel are not a sign of weakness. For the Christian, nor are they inherently sinful or a sign of weak faith. Perhaps they may be, but to jump there first is evidence of an ill-formed theology of sin and suffering. If anything, these questions and strong emotions when sorrow hits are first and foremost a sign of being alive in a broken world.

When God answers opposed to our will, we feel a gap between God’s goodness and our painful reality. “If God is good, why did He allow ________?” So what do we do with the “no”? Especially my Christian family: what do we do when God gives us or someone around us exactly what we don’t want?

Sadly, the common Christian response to pain is unlike our Savior’s. With some exceptions, my experience and the experiences of others has confirmed this. In this gap, we don’t know what to do. We know how to rejoice with those who rejoice. We don’t know how to weep with those who weep. Christian funerals are now “celebrations of life”, with the expectation of joy while excluding sorrow. Many Christians show great discomfort with strong feelings, filling the gap with Bible verses, “at least” statements, or platitudes like, “God did heal them, just not in the way we wanted.” “God works everything for good.” Our worship avoids sorrow. There is an overwhelming “toxic positivity” in the church.

I too believed this toxic positivity, until deep grief found me. Then I began seeing everything with new eyes. We bring meals to help the struggling but don’t know how to bring presence. When tears, emotions, accusations and questions for God arise, we don’t know how to direct that to God: corporately or individually. We are so very uncomfortable with pain, that we attempt to minimize it, downplay it, normalize it, distract from it, or put a bow on it. And since there are few examples of biblical lament in our churches, it’s easy to believe our strong feelings and questions for God are wrong. The twisted theology given through these positive attempts to cheer the sorrowful is that God does not grieve the pain of people and his creation gone wrong. And since he doesn’t, we shouldn’t either. The damaging theology says the godly response is a smile in the face of tragedy.

And the ensuing carnage is great. This is one the reasons many grieving, hurting people don’t feel like they belong at church. Once Mom’s cancer came on the scene, I began meeting more people who loved Jesus and had left the church because they felt out of place with their grief. Christian authors like J. Todd Billings, Randy Alcorn and Clarissa Moll also shared similar experiences.

Unlike the religious response of avoiding or downplaying pain, God shows us a different way to deal with this gap. There are enough examples of this to fill a book, but one of the many places to start discovering this better path is the lamenting Psalms. It doesn’t take long to understand that David and Asaph, to name two of the writers of Scripture, loved God very much. These men felt severe doubt, violent anger, and horrendous pain. They questioned God’s goodness. They accused him of inactivity. They demand that God work. They cried so much that they lost sleep. Enough tears fall down their faces that they say “tears have been my food”. They know significant pain, suffering, and injustice. They ask God all the questions. “Why? How long? Where are you? What are you doing? How could you allow this? Aren’t you righteous? I don’t get it!”

And that’s just naming two writers of Scripture. I haven’t even started with the prophets.

These men were human, and dealt with the same pain, questions, doubts, fears, anger that we do. But they choose to deal with them quite differently than I have, or our culture has, or the church has. What do they do with their emotions, their problems, their fierce anger, their demands for justice, their agonized cries of pain?

These songwriters not only acknowledge these feelings, but direct their anger, questions and pain to God. They cry out to the one who could have stepped in, but for reasons beyond our understanding, did not. In doing so, they do two very helpful things for us fellow suffering humans.

  1. They acknowledge the problem we feel. God could have stepped in to stop it. He did not. And we won’t understand why. Nowhere in Scripture does God spell out his reasons for allowing them. It is as if knowing why is not what we need. And while it hurts me a bit to say this, it’s true and I need to hear it: If God operated according to my understanding, he would be a very small god indeed. It is nothing short of pompous arrogance to think that if I can’t come up with a good reason for _______ to happen, then there must not be a good reason for it at all (more of what I’ve learned from Tim Keller).
  2. They give us a model to follow. In a culture that either represses our strong feelings & questions or simply expresses or vents them, these songwriters show us that A. feeling them is human, and B. we need to pray our strong feelings and questions to God.

As Mark Vroegop says in “Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy”, “To cry is human. To lament is Christian.”

As the psalms of lament illustrate, grief and loss take us on a journey. A very long journey. It is the nature of lament. Psalm 6 became one of my immediate cries after Mom died. I could relate to it and cry out those words, while I still cannot sing the rejoicing praise songs at church.

“Have compassion on me, LORD, for I am weak. Heal me, LORD, for my bones are in agony. I am sick at heart. How Long, O LORD, until you restore me?

“I am worn out from sobbing. All night I flood my bed with weeping, drenching it with my tears. My vision is blurred by grief; my eyes are worn out because of all my enemies.” (NLT, verses 2-3, 6-7).

Most of the lamenting psalms show a pattern: cry out to God with all your feelings and questions, remember what is true of Him, and trust. The trouble is, our own process is not as simple as this initially sounds. We don’t cry out once and arrive at trust. As much as we’d like it in our pain-averse culture, lament is not quick, linear, smooth, one-time-fix-all. Our hearts are more complicated than that. Grief is more complicated than that. Some psalms do not even follow that pattern: like Psalm 39 and 88. They end in a way that shock us. I would not be surprised if Christians today would approach David and the sons of Korah and chide them for their “lack of faith” or for not being more positive. Through these Psalms, I began to learn this about lament. While others may rush me, God is patient with my heart and does not hold me to a timeline.

It is unloving and wrong to point hurting people to the awesome truths of who God is and expect them to just “get it”. It’s akin to asking a seven-year-old to comprehend calculus without giving them the time they need to wrestle and search and learn the language of mathematics. For example, a well-meaning person sent me some texts a few days after Mom died. They were Bible verses about God’s goodness. I suppose they thought I needed reminding of that. Another kind friend sent me a Christmas card with Proverbs 31 cited, telling me to read that, while I should remember that Mom is with Jesus and all is well. While well-intentioned, these messages told me to fast-forward the grieving process and arrive at trusting God. They didn’t know that I needed to weep. To wrestle. To scream to God, “Why?” To doubt and question God. To enter the grieving process He has set out for me. Tim Keller pointed out in a sermon titled “Praying Our Doubts” that while we tend to brand doubt immediately as “sinful”, doubt also has tremendous positive energy. When we dismiss doubt, or other parts of the lamenting process, we shut the door to growth and depth of faith. Pain compels us to go on a journey with God. We need to enter the reality of our valley of the shadow of death, and with deep trembling, call out to God there.

Instead of crippling silence and isolating those who are holding deep sorrow, we need to learn how to lament. Both as a church and as individuals. It is the bridge from despair to trust when God gives us our “no”, and life as we know it shatters. Lament is the godly response to death and suffering. It is walking in Jesus’ footsteps as he suffered. What if, instead of platitudes or distance, we actually entered our own pain and the pain of others? What if we joined hands with the suffering and cried with them? What if we allowed us space to wrestle with God? What if we welcomed our doubts and questions, anger and fury, guttural cries of agony? What if we remembered “through much suffering we must enter the kingdom of God”?

It is through these kinds of things that we make space for a hurting world to seek God. Unlike our culture, God welcomes our questions, our anger, our outbursts, our honest cries, our doubts and fears, our wailing. He shares in our pain. He grieves along with us, just more deeply, violently and thoroughly than we do. It only took my kids and I a few chapters into studying Jeremiah to see that God is a lamenting God. He meets us in the darkness in a way that words can’t describe. Only one who has been thrust into their pit and cried out to God with much fear and trembling knows what I am talking about. We don’t get our answers to “Why?” in our valley. We get God. We get him with us, because He knows darkness, too. And it is precisely there, when we have nothing left, that we realize we need nothing else but him. And if that is not true worship, I don’t know what is.

True worship comes from the pit. It comes out of darkness, not by avoiding it. It comes from entering our pain and wrestling with God there. Anything less than that tends to be shallow.

You see, the cry of lament is not only ours. There was another who suffered greatly. Someone who didn’t deserve the wretchedness that came his way. Someone who did cry out “Why?” to God in his greatest agony, and received his “no”. In his dark moments, Jesus lamented. Unlike us, he was totally abandoned by God in his suffering. He was abandoned and rejected in order that we would never be alone in our sorrow. His rejection guaranteed our inclusion. It’s a mystery beyond us: God uses pain to save all who would believe in Jesus. Yet we still cringe and shy away from treading the road of suffering in our Christian lives.

We’ve forgotten that the way of Jesus is the way of pain. It is a tear-strewn and bloody path. The more we grow to resemble Jesus, we must remember that we will resemble the Man of Sorrows. As Tim Keller points out in another sermon titled “Praying Our Tears”, the more we become like Jesus, the more pain we will feel. The more we will weep. This “only victorious”, toxic positivity neglects the whole gospel. It keeps people from growing in their faith. It holds back healing. It slams the door for those suffering to begin the all-valuable process of wrestling with God, asking the hard questions, seeking truth amidst all the doubts and conflict and confusion.

What if churches realized that lament itself IS worship? What if we began to learn lament once again? What if we made room on Sunday mornings for weeping and grief? Songs that reflected not just the hope and joy but also the harrowing cries of being a suffering human being? What if we welcomed people wrestling through doubts, anger, frustration, fear, and those hard questions for God? What if we told them they were in great company with writers of Scripture, and Jesus himself? What if we not only held thanksgiving services but lament services as well? Took time to remember the dead who went before us and are still part of the body? Sought to become trained in grief care? Learned about dying, death, loss, and how to walk well through them? Moved toward people in pain? Acknowledged that God’s answers are both what we want and the very thing we don’t? Cried out to God for our own pain and others?

I firmly believe it would open doors that have been barred shut, keeping deeply wounded people out of churches and away from God. People would begin to heal. A deeper, more profound, more precious understanding of the gospel would begin to shine. It would give us a more accurate, biblically rounded view of our Savior, instead of the toxic positivity of only victory, joy, trust and goodness. Making room for lament and sorrow may seem counterintuitive, uncomfortable, perhaps even “wrong”. So did the cross. Yet it is precisely through the pain Jesus didn’t want but to which he submitted that God chose to save us. How could he not also use our sufferings, if we would only enter them? Without suffering, worship remains shallow. Without bringing our unfiltered questions and strong emotions to God, people continue to be shut out from the kingdom of God. It is only in the greatest of depths that the greatest of praise to our suffering Savior rises, and the roots of faith grow deep.

Perhaps, someday, when we get the answer we didn’t want, we may learn to lament like Jesus.