Embracing the Gift of Lament
If you know me at all, you know I’m the “let’s keep this train moving” kind of woman. I’m your cheerleader, your hype girl, the one who’ll help you find the light when everything feels dark. And listen, this isn’t some toxic positivity situation where I’m slapping a smile on top of pain and calling it faith. No. I genuinely choose hope. Daily I anchor myself in the Word of God. Nehemiah 8:10 promises that my strength is derived from the joy of the Lord. Even when the world is spinning and my personal life feels like it’s coming apart at the seams, I choose to believe God. I choose to believe God is still good.
But a few days ago? I was stopped mid-stride with a single word that felt totally foreign to the way that I’m wired…I knew immediately it had to be the Lord.
You may be asking, so what was the word? The word was Lament.
I’m sorry, what now? Lament? That’s not exactly in my vocabulary. I don’t do the whole sit-in-your-feelings thing, at least not for too long. I’m more of a “feel it for a second, then find the solution” type. So naturally, my mind started racing: What even is lament? Why is this considered a spiritual discipline? And how in the world am I supposed to weave lamenting into my already packed life?
But here’s where it gets really interesting. Days before the Lord dropped this word into my spirit, He’d already been setting me up. He prompted me to do something that sounded simple but turned out to be one of the hardest exercises I’ve done in a long time. He told me to list out how I was actually feeling. Not the Sunday morning, “I’m blessed and highly favored” version. The real, unfiltered, messy truth of what was happening in my heart.
So, I sat down with my journal, pen in hand, thinking this would take maybe ten minutes. But as I started writing, something broke open. I was overcome with sadness. Emotions I didn’t even know I’d been carrying started spilling onto the page. Years ago, I remember reading an article that said we experience more than 200 different emotions. Two hundred! And there I was, realizing I could maybe name five on a good day. Talk about emotional illiteracy. I sat there thinking, “Wow, what’s really going on?”
What was happening was me giving myself permission to feel – to feel the full spectrum of what it means to be human.
Here’s what I know: every single day brings something new. Something hard. Something that makes you want to crawl under the covers and not come out. Our world is chaotic. Our personal lives are complicated. Disappointments pile up. Setbacks knock us down. Hearts break. People leave. Dreams die. Loss becomes a companion we never asked for.
And yet, how many of us actually stop to process what we’re feeling?
When was the last time you really lamented? Not just acknowledged that something hurt, but actually sat with that hurt and brought it honestly before the Lord in prayer? When did you last give yourself permission to grieve without rushing toward the lesson, the silver lining, or the comeback?
This is what makes lament so powerful. It’s not complaining. It’s not whining. It’s not a lack of faith. Lament is sacred honesty with God about our pain.
Look at the book of Lamentations. The entire book. Five whole chapters dedicated to grief. Jeremiah, who is known as the “weeping prophet”, didn’t sugarcoat Jerusalem’s destruction. He sat in the rubble and wept. He poured out his anguish without apologizing for it (Lamentations 1:1-2).
Or consider David, a man after God’s own heart, crying out in Psalm 13:1, “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” That’s not doubt. That’s trust deep enough to be honest.
And Jesus? Our Savior stood at Lazarus’s tomb and wept, even though He knew resurrection was minutes away (John 11:35). If Jesus made space for grief, who are we to rush past ours?
Lament gives us permission to grieve. It creates a holy space where we can name our losses, voice our confusion, and express our heartbreak without fear that God will reject us for not being “strong enough.” And here’s the breakthrough I’m having: lament doesn’t cancel out hope. It actually makes room for a deeper, more authentic hope. Because real hope isn’t built on pretending we’re fine. It’s built on bringing our shattered pieces to a God who sees every crack and loves us anyway.
Lament matters because pain that’s never processed doesn’t just disappear. It goes underground. It morphs into bitterness. It hardens into numbness. It becomes that vague, nameless heaviness we carry but can’t quite explain. When we refuse to lament, we’re not protecting ourselves. We’re just delaying the healing God is trying to give us.
God can handle our honesty. He’s not intimidated by our tears. He’s not appalled by our questions. He’s not afraid of our anger. In fact, He invites all of it. Jesus said, “Come to me, all who are weary and burdened” (Matthew 11:28). Not “come when you’ve cleaned yourself up” or “come when you’ve got your act together.” Come now. Come messy. Come with the weight you’ve been carrying.
When I sat there and actually dialed into how I was feeling, something shifted. I wasn’t falling apart. I was tapping into a deeper, truer part of myself. And in that raw, unfiltered moment, I encountered the Lord in a fresh new way. He met me in my sadness. He gave me permission to grieve losses I didn’t even realize I was mourning. He let me stop performing strength I didn’t actually possess.
I have a question for you… when was the last time you truly lamented? When did you last stop moving long enough to feel what’s underneath all the jostling and coping and pushing forward? What disappointments are you carrying that you’ve never named out loud? What losses have you rushed past without stopping to mourn?
I’m learning that being the hopeful, joy-filled woman God called me to be doesn’t mean bypassing the hard parts. It means dragging them into the light and laying them at His feet. It means trusting that He’s big enough to hold both my pain and my praise in the same breath. Lament isn’t the opposite of faith. It’s faith honest enough to say, “This hurts, and I need You to meet me here.”
Maybe the Lord is extending the same invitation to you that He gave me. Maybe He’s asking you to stop. To sit. To list your emotions without editing them. To name your grief. To lament what actually needs to be mourned. Because on the other side of that honest crying out isn’t despair or defeat.
It’s the kind of hope that can only come from meeting Him in the mess and discovering He was there all along.
What would it look like for you to practice lament this week? What permission do you need to give yourself to finally feel what’s real? What would change if you stopped and let yourself break just long enough for the Lord to put you back together?
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