Lament is just expressing honest emotions to God when life is not going as planned. Wherever we’re hurt, frustrated, confused, betrayed, overwhelmed, sad, or disappointed, lament is the language God has given us to talk with Him right in the middle of life’s messes. It’s real talk with God when you’re hurting, when all you can do is cry out for help. p33

            D.A. Carson, a professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School writes: “there is no attempt in Scripture to whitewash the anguish of God’s people when they undergo suffering. They argue with God, they complain to God, they weep before God. Theirs is not a faith that leads to dry-eyed stoicism, but to faith so robust it wrestles with God.” p 34

            …somewhere we lost the Biblical language of lament. We have not discovered the beauty in sorrow, so we try to get out of pain as quickly as possible – and we expect others to do so as well. But life will let all of us down, and we need a way to talk about it – a way we have lost along the way. p 35

            Lament is a channel for powerful transformation. It is exactly the right kind of song we need for hope and healing p 35

            Lament means “to mourn, to wail”. It is not about being polite, restrained and holding it together

            We cannot carefully address the wounds of others if we are carelessly addressing our own. p 37

            If we don’t allow painful emotions to surface, then we are setting expectations for ourselves that even God cannot meet. Nobody laments more than God Himself. and we ae called to be like Him. p 38

Reclaiming a Lost Language

To know God is to need God p 40

It is not just suck it up, but put a good spin on things and trust God – LIE

            …it seems to me that lament is the prayer that we have forgotten. I’ll be the first person to say I forgot it myself. We are so quick to get to the beauty that we skip over the brokenness or have a hard time seeing beauty arise amidst brokenness. This has led us into some dangerous and unbiblical theology. And if we are going to recover a healthy, biblical understanding of how God meets us in our pain, we need to recover the lost prayer of lament in our churches. Authentic praise flows from honest prayer, unrestrained lament, and trusting dependence. And this is where brokenness becomes beautiful. p 41

            A lament saves us from staying stuck in grief and rescues us from a faith based on falsehoods… A lament denied turns into a lie. p 42

            While lament may not change our circumstances, it will help clear up our misunderstandings about God. When we lament to God we see Him more clearly on the other side.  p 42

Faking fine is hurting us, and it’s time to break our habit. A lament, on the other hand, is a cry that God can work with, because it keeps the conversation going just when we need it most. p 42

Letting Go of our Coping Mechanisms

Life is not always a result of the choices we make. Sometimes we are formed significantly by the choices of others. p 45

Doing the best we can by coping with the circumstances as they come may seem to work in the moment, but coping is a cheap substitute for healing…. the problem is our coping mechanisms are too often based on the goal of stuffing our emotions and pulling it together and appearing strong, when the pathway to healing is honest lament. It’s a shortcut and a quick fix that rarely delivers the long term results we’re hoping for…. In fact, they short circuit the healing process… p 48

Faking it will make me strong – LIE p 48

If we don’t learn to lament we will fail to see God for who He really is. Knowing God will include lamenting to God, and listening to His laments too.  p 49

It’s not really a big deal anyway – LIE p 50

We are often gentler with others than we are with ourselves

I’ll never let myself be vulnerable to getting hurt again p 52

            We begin to see ourselves as protectors and keepers of our hearts instead of leaving that responsibility to God. p 53

I made a vow to myself that I would guard my heart from ever getting hurt like this again. I decided it would be my responsibility, a promise I would keep to myself. If I’m honest, I felt I could trust my own discernment rather than God’s pathway and plans. In this way, I exchanged the honest prayer of lament for a prayer of sorts to myself. Instead of crying out to the God who always hears I was left to my own devices.  p 56

I’ll just put the past behind me and move on p 57

This opens the doors to believe many false ideas about God

Of course I wanted to forget my past – it was painful – but God wanted to enter into it. The Almighty sees our wounds as entry points to do His healing work. God draws close to us in our brokenness (Ps 34:18) so denying lament is really denying Him an opportunity to love us well, to see us in our brokenness, and to bind up our wounds. When we dismiss pain and move on without lament, we could be removing God from the very sacred ground He wants to meet us in. Ignoring pain is an unwitting attempt to silence God. p 59

Emotions are dangerous and to be avoided at all costs

Author and counselor Dan Allender puts it this way: “Emotions are like messengers from the front lines of the battle zone. Our tendency is to kill the messenger.” p 61

We are often ashamed or embarrassed of our emotions…While we are never taught in Scripture to make a decision based on our emotions, we are also encouraged to be honest about them and examine them. p 61

We all want to know the answers to the questions of why we experience brokenness. It is human nature to want to wrap our heads around why something so terrible could happen to us. But when we do not lean into lament to wrestle with God over these questions, we will often turn to blame. p 67

God takes the concealing of lament very seriously because grief matters to Him. p 71

Lament builds greater intimacy with Him.

To groan is to lament from the core of our being. Sometimes the pain is so deep that we can only cry wordlessly. Our bodies store trauma, and sometimes groaning is the only way to get it out.  p 74

We can develop a habit of coping so well that we don’t even recognize that we are pretending.

For years I had interpreted my self-sufficiency as godly. I didn’t pretend to fake fine, I honestly thought I was fine. I had fooled myself as well. I had so well mastered the art of suppressing every emotion I ever felt that I gave God credit for healing I had never experienced. p 79

Before we can lament our pain and offenses we must acknowledge them.  p 88

All my efforts to maintain some semblance of control over my life and my emotions did not keep the enemy out, but they did keep God out. And if I could not let God in, well, of course, i had difficulty letting others in as well. p 90

I had spent more than two decades trying to convince everyone – trying to convince myself – that I had it together, that I had put my past behind me, that I was an overcomer. Lament, in my mind, threatened to undo all that I had built in my life so far. p 91As I read my Bible and found these prayers (of lament) again and again, I was astonished to see the way they opened my eyes to who God really is. My stuff-it-down, suck-it-up mentality for so long had developed a serious warp to who I thought God was and how I believed He saw me. But as I got real with Him in prayer, He began to get real with me. p 99

The very same God of the harvest is the God of the desert. Could it be possible that God had thwarted my plans in order to destroy my shallow understanding of HIs love? Could God have allowed difficult circumstances so I could wrestle with who He really is? Maybe the messing up of our plans is exactly what we need. God will go to great lengths to squash a false Gospel and repair a cracked foundation in our faith. He does this not out of anger but out of love. He knows we can miss HIm completely if we misunderstand HIm. p100

My behavior is not my identity

 The greatest gift that has come from my suffering is a deeper understanding of the character of God and HIs thoughts towards me. This is why we are blessed when we mourn. This is why we must take time to mourn. Admitting grief over loss does not mean that we are ungrateful for God’s provision. Lamenting actually deepens our gratitude, giving us the capacity to be more receptive to the blessings that do come.

Lamenting is a surrender to God’s sovereignty. (Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane) p 126

When we keep our laments locked inside, we bubble up with bitterness towards God. We become buried under our own frustrations and doubt. But when we bring our concerns to God and ask Him openly, “Lord, how long?” it opens both a conversation and an opportunity for us to be transformed in the waiting, p 128

God is more interested in transforming us and having a relationship with us than in trying to fix us or our situation on our timetable. p 137 We are strengthened and heartened in the waiting, even when we don’t know ‘how long’. p 141

But whatever His answer was, lament was keeping my faith alive. Lament helped me hold onto what might become good, and faith helped me hold on to hope for another day. p 141

I had to bathe myself in Scripture and get to know God again. I had to spend time with Him and in His word to remind myself of HIs true character, not the warped reflection I was seeing of Him through the lens of my circumstance. p 149

While God will never forget or abandon us, at times we will feel forgotten. It’s not that God is distant, it’s just that sometimes He feels distant. It’s not that God is preoccupied, it’s just that our struggles make us feel like we’re facing the world alone. What is amazing is that we are given full permission to voice this honestly. p150

No More Faking Fine – Esther Fleece -buy on Amazon