“How long will you hide your face from me?” (Ps 13:1)
—A struggler laments to God

“I will never leave you or forsake you” (Heb 13:5)
—God responds to all seekers

Here’s a couple of profoundly simple thoughts: life is not always fair, and life is unpredictable in spite of our efforts to make it so.

We yearn for order; we get chaos. We codify human behavior; we turn rebellious. We try to manage time; we find it’s too soon passing. We assume we’ll be healthy; we encounter illness. We trust materialism to fulfill us; we discover it’s all easily lost.

Not a very upbeat state of this world’s existence, is it?

Ken Cope sees it like this:

We live in a fallen world, full of disappointment and loss, and we often feel empty and unfulfilled and incredibly alone. But while God is not there to fix our problems and make the pain go away, he is always walking beside us. In the ongoing journey of life, we are given the opportunity to know God and ourselves through the process of lamenting and grieving. (from the book A Sacred Sorrow by Michael Card)

Lamenting and grieving? Is that allowed in 21st Century America? Is that biblical? Is it spiritually permissible?

It may be counter-cultural, even in some churches, but lamenting is truly biblical. Bible readers find that faithful followers of Yahweh all encountered seasons of distress. And more than a few of them openly, verbally, took their distresses and disgusts right to the ears of their God.
They knew, they loved, they trusted in a God who was not immobile, not impotent, not distant. They knew God as one knows an actual loving parent, one open to all expressions: praise and dismay, thanksgiving and frustration.

And they are called faithful.

So when life crashes in on us, when dreams shatter into shards, when the doctor delivers startling news, when the house is destroyed by fire, when the stable job is lost, when the friend becomes an enemy, when lack of control depresses our spirits, when the world is overrun with evil: be faithful. Go to the Psalms, particularly the questioning ones, the laments not read in Sunday morning worship services.

Find a trusted, faithful companion. Pray with brutal honesty. Unload the burden, with all its ugly sentiments. There is hope to be found in voiced despair.

And know, truly know, that our God is one who will always live up to this promise: I will never leave you nor forsake you.

—Virgil Fry