Lament in Chronic Pain

Today's Scripture

Today's psalm is the darkest prayer in the Bible — and it is in the Bible on purpose.

Psalm 88:1-3 — "O Lord, God of my salvation, I cry out day and night before you. Let my prayer come before you; incline your ear to my cry! For my soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol."

Psalm 88:6-7 — "You have put me in the depths of the pit, in the regions dark and deep. Your wrath lies heavy upon me, and you overwhelm me with all your waves."

Matthew 27:46 — "And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, 'Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?' that is, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'"

The Big Idea

Lament is an old word for telling God, to his face, that something hurts — and refusing to let go of him while you say it. Chronic pain needs this prayer more than any other, because chronic pain does not resolve on a worship-song schedule. God wrote lament into his own book so that the long sufferer would never run out of words.

Reflection

The psalm that ends in the dark

Open your social feed and count the laments. You will not find any. The feed is a highlight reel — vacations, promotions, answered prayers. Many worship services work the same way: songs of victory, songs of breakthrough, nothing in a minor key. So when your suffering stretches into its fifth year, you conclude the obvious: there is no song for me here.

The Psalms say otherwise. Roughly a third of them are laments — official, Spirit-inspired complaints. And one of them goes further than all the rest. Psalm 88 begins with faith — "O Lord, God of my salvation, I cry out day and night before you" — and then descends, verse by verse, into the pit: "You have put me in the depths of the pit, in the regions dark and deep. Your wrath lies heavy upon me, and you overwhelm me with all your waves" (Psalm 88:6-7).

Every other lament psalm pivots somewhere — "but I have trusted in your steadfast love." Psalm 88 never pivots. Its last line is Psalm 88:18: "You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me; my companions have become darkness." That is the end. The last word of the psalm, in Hebrew, is darkness.

And notice who is praying. The title line credits Heman the Ezrahite, and verse 15 tells us his story in one breath: "Afflicted and close to death from my youth up, I suffer your terrors; I am helpless" (Psalm 88:15). From my youth up. This is not a man having a bad month. This is a lifetime of illness — the Bible's own chronic sufferer, praying out of decades of pain that never lifted. If anyone in Scripture knows what year eleven of an unhealed condition feels like, it is Heman. And his prayer was not rejected. It was published.

The Holy Spirit put an unresolved prayer in the Bible. Think about what that means. God knew some of his children would live through seasons — long ones — where the turn toward praise does not come on schedule. So he gave them a psalm shaped exactly like their night, and he called it Scripture. Corrie ten Boom's sister Betsie, dying in a Nazi concentration camp, handed Corrie the sentence that became her life's message:

"There is no pit so deep, that God's love is not deeper still." — Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place

Psalm 88 talks about the pit. Betsie measured it. The pit is real; the love runs deeper than the pit goes.

Complaint with God's address on it

But wait — doesn't the Bible condemn complaining? It does: the wilderness generation "grumbled" and was judged for it. So what makes Psalm 88 holy and the grumbling sinful?

The address. Israel grumbled about God to each other, around the campfire, behind his back. The psalmist complains to God, by name, to his face. Psalm 142:1-2 shows the posture: "With my voice I cry out to the Lord... I pour out my complaint before him; I tell my trouble before him." Before him. The same hard words that are gossip when muttered sideways become prayer when aimed upward. Lament keeps the conversation alive; grumbling walks out of the room.

The prophets prayed this way too. Habakkuk 1:2 — "O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear?" That is an inspired prophet accusing God of not listening — in Scripture. God can absorb the accusation. What wounds the relationship is not the honesty. It is the silence, or the leaving.

C.S. Lewis, after watching his wife die of cancer, had no patience left for tidy religious comfort:

"Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand." — C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Lament is for people who refuse fake consolation but cannot stop talking to God. Tim Keller explains why that grip matters so much: "Suffering is unbearable if you aren't certain that God is for you and with you." Lament is how you stay close enough to find out that he is.

So what does this look like at 2 a.m., when the pain is loud and your own words have run out? It looks like borrowing. You do not have to compose anything. The Psalms were written, in part, so that sufferers could pray secondhand. Open Psalm 88, or Psalm 13, or Psalm 142, and read the words slowly as your own — the way you might borrow a friend's coat when you are caught in the rain. The church has prayed these prayers for three thousand years. They are not too dark for God. He wrote them down first.

The turn that waits twenty verses

Lament is not the whole story, though — and the Bible shows us where hope enters, and when. Lamentations 3:19-24 is the great example. The poet spends verse after verse cataloguing his misery: "Remember my affliction and my wanderings, the wormwood and the gall!" Wormwood is a bitter plant; gall is poison. He is saying: my life tastes like bitterness and poison, and God did it.

Then, at verse 21, the hinge: "But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness." The most famous words about God's faithfulness in the whole Bible live in its saddest book — after the complaint, never instead of it. The hope is load-bearing precisely because the lament was allowed to stand first. Skip the twenty verses of honesty and "great is your faithfulness" becomes a fridge magnet. Pray them, and it becomes a rock.

Samuel Rutherford, a Scottish pastor exiled from his church in the 1630s, wrote letters from his own long winter that people still read four hundred years later. His most famous line: "I see that grace groweth best in winter." Not winter is pleasant. Grace grows there — slowly, under the snow, where nobody can see it yet.

Amy Carmichael, writing from two decades in a sickbed, traced the same hinge in a poem. Her sufferer tries forgetting the sorrow; the turmoil stays. He tries explanations; the turmoil stays. Then:

"He said, 'I will accept the breaking sorrow which God tomorrow will to his son explain.' Then did the turmoil deep within him cease. Not vain the word, not vain; for in acceptance lieth peace." — Amy Carmichael, "In Acceptance Lieth Peace"

Acceptance is not denial ("it doesn't hurt") and not despair ("it will never matter"). It is handing the unexplained thing to a God who will one day explain it. That is where lament is headed — not to answers, but to rest. And Spurgeon reminds the long sufferer what only the night can show:

"Hope itself is like a star — not to be seen in the sunshine of prosperity, and only to be discovered in the night of adversity." — Charles Spurgeon

The Lamenter on the cross

Now the deepest thing about Christian lament. The rawest complaint in the Psalter is Psalm 22:1 — "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning?" And at the darkest hour in history, Jesus chose those exact words. Matthew 27:46 — "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

The sinless Son of God died praying a lament. He did not keep it together on the cross. He reached for the psalm of abandonment the way you reach for memorized words when your own run out. Which means: when you pray your darkest prayers, you are not drifting from Jesus. You are quoting him. He went into the real pit — actual forsakenness, the one Psalm 88 only feared — so that your darkness, however long, would never be forsakenness. It can feel like the absence of God. Because of the cross, it cannot be the absence of God.

J.I. Packer points to the bedrock under every lament:

"What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it — the fact that he knows me. I am graven on the palms of his hands. I am never out of his mind." — J.I. Packer, Knowing God

On the days you cannot feel God, hold this: being known matters more than feeling. And when even words fail, Romans 8:26 — "the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words." God the Spirit groans your lament for you when you are too tired to pray it. Lament is not a prayer God tolerates. It is a prayer God himself is praying inside you, through the Son who prayed it first.

Going Deeper

Pray Psalm 88 aloud today — the whole thing, slowly. Do not edit it. Do not soften it. Do not staple a happier verse to the end to fix it. Let it end the way God let it end: in the dark, still addressed to "O Lord, God of my salvation." Then sit in silence for two minutes. You have just prayed words the Holy Spirit wrote for a day exactly like yours, and the God who kept this psalm in his book has kept every word of yours.