Prayers of Lament - By Mikella Van Dyke
I have a son who has difficulty expressing his emotions in any way other than erupting in anger. He is so emotional that I pursued counseling for him. His counselor told him that when he gets angry, he should push against a wall and try to get some of his frustrations out without physically hurting anyone. He needed to learn to use healthy physicality to express his emotions, and this pushing is supposed to help him productively deal with his emotions. As he showed my husband this strategy, my husband took him aside (since he is a builder and conscious of his home) and told him that maybe instead of pushing the wall, he should just pretend to go against the wall so that he does not inadvertently destroy it.
This simple suggestion had me laughing, and I was quickly reminded of the fact that we often treat God this way with our desires and emotions. We think God (or in this case, the wall) can't handle the truth of our emotions, so we are reluctant to express them to Him, pretending to lean our bodies against the wall but not giving the wall the full extent of our weight or our grief.
Whether it be our true emotions, or our desires and longings, we often see a pattern as believers in how we deal with these innermost feelings. Many of our desires that have been frustrated by life's setbacks, disappointments, and relationships are hung on coat racks in our entryways. They serve as visible daily reminders of the losses we have incurred and the dreams that have died, but we cannot entirely give ourselves a reason to put them away or wear them. Both options would be too painful, so we pass them daily, hanging in our entryways as discarded, visible placeholders of dreams that have died and longings or prayers that have remained unanswered. Do we discard the coat, put it away, or let it sit in our entryway, ignored within the shadows of our minds? We grasp onto our self-sufficiency to carry us in these complex emotions and unmet desires, forgetting that we have a God who sees and cares. We don't learn to place the item at the feet of Jesus because several lies are holding us back from expressing our feelings honestly before the Lord. We may be sitting with feelings of unworthiness, wondering if our desires or emotions are indeed just sinful human longings, or maybe we aren't sure God cares or wants to hear about how we truly feel.
We go through many emotions as humans, and many of us have conflicting perspectives on how to deal with these emotions biblically. Whether we believe God is unable to handle our feelings or that He would be surprised by what's truly hidden in our hearts, hiding our true feelings by stuffing them deeper into the recesses of our entryway often feels easier. (Think about what Adam and Eve did in the garden when confronted by God in Genesis 3:8) Prayer is often our last resort to push against the immovable wall. Instead, we often try to escape our uncomfortable emotions by spending money, scrolling through social media, or keeping ourselves extremely busy. The other response is to experience shame about feeling sad, especially if sin is involved, or we may seek to blame others when we feel this way. This can be for a number of reasons, but often our emotions feel icky or wrong–unworthy of being expressed before our holy God. Many of us grew up believing that expressing emotions was wrong, so we pretended to push against God, serving Him safe and cautious prayers instead of full-blown laments or expressions of grief.
As Christians, it is often culturally ingrained in us to feel that we cannot show signs of weakness or vulnerability. Many of us are used to expressions like, "Wow, they are such amazing Christians!" or "What great faith!" when hearing a Christian at a funeral declare faith and praise God for the difficult circumstances or if someone doesn't cry when she experiences a painful trial. But we know that faith is not a reason to be disingenuous with our feelings. Cultivating dependence on God is a leaning posture of prayer.
Friends, within this article I pray that you learn to bring your emotions to God first and foremost, understanding the value in your grief being brought before a loving Savior. I pray you will desire to steer your emotions in a way that filters them through God's Word, His truth, and the lens of Scripture. My heart for you is that you would ground yourself in the truth and be honest and vulnerable with your feelings before God, and then let God's Word and His character be the final word on your emotions."
Lament is truly such a transformative process, it helps build intimacy with our Father. Learning to lament was one of the most eye-opening, and relationship-building lessons of my life!
My prayer is that you, too, would learn the life-transforming practice of praying and bringing everything before a God who cares for you!
I invite you to pray about which discipline the Lord may have you incorporate into your life. How can you set goals, whether it is learning to grow in community, practicing the sabbath, adding silence to your days, or focusing on prayer? Can you ask someone to keep you accountable? Keep goals manageable, and remember that it is all based on grace. Remember that the ultimate desire is not to do a bunch of things and feel that God is more pleased, but to practice some age-old disciplines that draw our hearts and attention more to the Lord.
