I recently had the privilege of teaching on Psalm of Lament at Northland Christian Church — and I will be honest with you: it is something I have only recently been learning to practice myself.
Last year I went through some spiritual formation training — learning to actually practice spiritual disciplines, some of which were new to me. Lament was one of those. I had never officially practiced it. As part of that training I sat down and wrote my own lament for the first time.
And something shifted.
Not because lament fixed anything. But because it gave me language for something I had been carrying for years without knowing what to call it. I had been processing grief on my own — wrestling with my feelings and adding to the desperate prayer in the dark hospital room. But honestly, I wasn’t using the roadmap God had provided in Psalms.
This post is drawn from that teaching. I wanted to bring it here because I think a lot of us need permission to do something we have been told, in a hundred subtle ways, that we should not do.
Bring the real thing to God.
Listen to the full sermon here. Or the post-sermon podcast here.
The Song Stuck in Your Head
We all have loops.
The argument we did not win. The hurtful thing we said years ago that we still have not let go of. The diagnosis. The empty side of the bed. The grief that does not have a name but costs something every single day.
We are broken people living in a broken world. And carrying that brokenness is not comfortable — so we try to fix it, outrun it, explain it away.
But what if there was a different way?
What if God not only knew we would need space to process what we are carrying — but actually built instructions and examples of how to process our experiences into Scripture?
That space is called lament.
Why Lament Matters
Open the book of Psalms — one hundred and fifty songs and prayers — and ask which category shows up most. Not praise. Not thanksgiving.
Lament.
More than a third of the Psalms are laments. Some scholars count it as high as forty percent. That is more than any other single category in the entire book. And that is not even counting the fact that there is an entire book of the Bible named Lamentations — five chapters dedicated entirely to grief brought honestly before God.
This is not a coincidence. This is the same God writing the whole story — cover to cover — making sure His people had language for the hardest things.
And then Jesus stood on a hillside and said something that still stops me:
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” — Matthew 5:4
Read that slowly. He did not say — blessed are those who mourn and then, eventually, once they have finished grieving, they will be comforted later. The comfort is not a reward that shows up after the mourning ends. It is already inside the mourning. Right there in the middle of it.
That is the whole point of lament — to help us hold two true things in the same hand. How broken the world is. And how real God’s promises are. Not one or the other. Both at the same time. Both are true.
The Two Ditches
Most of us handle pain one of two ways. And both of them feel like the responsible option. Neither of them is.
Ditch One — We Rush to be Okay
Before you have even had a chance to feel it — someone hands you “everything happens for a reason.” You are scared and someone says “just have faith.” We skip straight to the bright side. We tidy up our grief before it has even finished bleeding.
A friend of ours — in his early twenties — was diagnosed with cancer. Thankfully they caught it early and he was able to fight it. But something he shared with us about that experience has stayed with me ever since. Somewhere in the middle of that battle he started to realize that people wanted to rush right past the reality of what he was going through. They wanted the pretty bow and did not know how to sit in the messiness and the fear.
We don’t suffer well. Not because we are bad people — because we are uncomfortable.
We look at someone else’s grief and think — I could not carry that. So we keep our distance. We hand out the verse instead of sitting in the dark with the person. And applying that same reasoning to ourselves, we hesitate to allow those uncomfortable feelings. This keeps us stuffing our feelings instead of processing them.
Ditch Two — We Sit in it Forever
The other ditch looks completely different but does the same damage.
This is where grief becomes a place to live rather than a road to walk. The wound stays open not because you are processing it but because you have stopped believing it will ever close. You rehearse the hurt. You replay the loss. You build your identity around the ache until the ache is all you can see.
Both ditches skip the processing — one by rushing past it, the other by getting stuck in it. And neither of them is lament.
Lament is the road between them.
The Road — Turning, Naming, Asking, Trusting
Psalm 22 is one of the most honest prayers in all of Scripture. It opens with a cry that should feel familiar to anyone who has ever felt abandoned in a hard season:
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” — Psalm 22:1
That is not polished faith. That is raw, desperate, honest faith. And it is in the Bible. Which means God can handle it.
Here is what the road of lament actually looks like — four movements drawn from the Psalms:
First — Turning
Lament begins with a choice to turn toward God rather than away from Him. Not because you feel like it. Not because you have it figured out. But because you have decided — however desperate or angry or confused you are — that He is still the one you are bringing it to.
Even “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” is a prayer. David did not stop talking to God when God felt absent. He turned toward God instead of turning toward himself or anyone /anything else.
Second — Naming
“I am a worm and not a man, scorned by everyone, despised by the people.” — Psalm 22:6
David does not manage his feelings for public consumption. He names them — specifically, honestly, without softening. The embarrassment. The isolation. The physical symptoms of grief listed in verses 14 and 15 — bones out of joint, heart like wax, strength dried up like a potsherd. (Note: David didn’t manage his joy for public consumption — he danced in his underwear).
This is what Lamentations 2:19 means when it says “pour out your heart like water before the presence of the Lord.” Pour out — not edit first. Not clean up before you show up. God does not need your presentable feelings. He wants the real ones.
What is the thing in your head right now — the loop you cannot stop — that you have not said out loud because you are afraid it sounds unstable or unfaithful?
Name it. He can handle it.
Third — Asking
“Do not be far from me, for trouble is near.” — Psalm 22:11
After naming the pain — David asks. Specifically. Repeatedly. He comes back to it again and again throughout the psalm — do not be far, come quickly, deliver me, rescue me, save me.
Real lament keeps asking even when the answer is slow. That is not weakness. Every time you ask again you are reminding yourself of what God is actually capable of. You are keeping your resolve from running out before the answer shows up.
Fourth — Trusting
“I will declare your name to my people; in the assembly I will praise you.” — Psalm 22:22
Nothing is fixed yet. David is still in it. But he already knows how the story ends — so he starts thanking God ahead of time.
Psalm 22 splits almost exactly in half. Everything before verse 22 — the forsaken cry, the scorn, the fear — that is the first half. And then right here, with no resolution described in between, the whole tone flips. From this point to the end of the psalm it is declaration and praise. Nothing changed in his circumstances. He just decided to start speaking differently to God.
I know this position personally. I have written about the night I prayed for a miracle — and then prayed the harder prayer here. What I remember most is that both prayers were real. The desperate asking and the surrendered trusting were not opposites. They were the same faith — just at different moments on the road.
That is what Peter meant when Jesus’s teaching got hard and people started walking away. Jesus asked the twelve — “Are you leaving too?” And Peter said:
“Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” — John 6:68
He did not say that because he had it all figured out. He said it because he had already decided — whatever happens, I am not walking away from you to go find answers somewhere else.
That is trusting. Not certainty about how the story ends. Certainty about who you are staying with while it unfolds.
You Are Not Behind
So — the loop in your head right now. The grief that does not have a name. The anger you have been afraid to bring to God because it sounds unstable or unfaithful.
God wants you to name it. Not brush by it. Not get stuck in it. But bring it — honestly, specifically, repeatedly — to the One who is not fragile enough to be undone by your real feelings.
Turning. Naming. Asking. Trusting.
That is the road.
You do not have to do all four perfectly. Some days you will only have energy for the naming part — and that is enough. Because even that is turning toward God instead of away from Him.
I am not going to wrap this up neatly — because lament does not work that way and neither does real life. If you are still in the middle of it right now — you are not behind. You are not doing this wrong. You are just where David was in verse one before he ever got to verse twenty-two.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
You do not have to wait until the mourning is finished to find that out.
Two Questions to Sit With This Week
Which ditch do you live in more often — rushing to be okay or sitting in it forever?
What would it look like to bring something to God this week without needing to fix it first — to just name it out loud and let Him hold it?
If you are in a season of lament right now — the free prayer list was made for exactly this. Prayers for yourself, your spouse, and your kids — for the hard days and the ones that have no name. And if you want to go deeper — Praying Through the Hard Middle was written for the seasons when the words will not come on their own. 🤍