Good Grief: Learning Lament From David and Jesus
Podcast: Lament As Worship (Part 2)
I recently joined Dawn Byington on her podcast, Grieving With God, to discuss lament as worship. If you haven’t listened to part 1 of our conversation, you can find it here.
In part 2, we discuss:
How does lament honor God even in the midst of our pain and sorrow?
How can lament help us process deep grief and trauma in a way that helps us grow closer to God?
How can we begin to incorporate lament into our worship, prayer life, and daily life?
Where do we start with lament?
Here are a few sneak peeks into the episode:
“If you think about any relationship you have with a person, if there is no depth or honesty to the relationship, then it's going to lack intimacy. And true intimacy with another person requires honesty and connection. And so when we lament with God, we are being honest in a personal conversation with him.”
“I need to voice my pain before God. Think about your heart—your arteries and blood vessels. If those things get clogged, then your heart can't function the way it's supposed to. And sometimes our emotions get clogged. We get emotionally clogged. We need to be able to give voice, to express those emotions so that we can keep functioning and move toward healing, so that we don't become stunted or stuck in our pain.”
“If Jesus is the perfect image, the perfect representation of God, if he is fully God and fully man, then we have in him a very clear picture of what life lived honestly before God looks like, right? If Jesus wept at Lazarus' grave, knowing that he was going to raise him from the dead, if he wept in the garden of Gethsemane, when he was in the midst of His suffering—pleading three times for God to allow the cup to pass from Him or allow salvation to happen in a different way. And if he cried out from the cross, My God, My God, why have You forsaken me? Then we too can carry our pain to God. We can wrestle with him in our fears and doubts, and we can plead with him for help.”
You can watch Part 2 of our conversation here, or you can listen here.
May you come to know the comfort of the suffering Savior, the nearness of the God who is with us, and the intimacy with God that is available to us through lament.
Love you guys,
CC
P.S. The next WholeHearted Project article will be Part 3 of our series on The Broken and Beautiful Church. If you have not read the previous posts, you can find them here:
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