Lament in Chronic Pain

Today's Reading

Read Psalm 88 in its entirety. Slowly. Read every verse. Notice that there is no turn. The other psalms of complaint usually pivot at some point — "but you, O Lord, have heard my prayer" — and end with confidence. Psalm 88 does not. The last word in Hebrew is machshak: darkness.

Read Lamentations 3:1-24. The first twenty verses are the deepest cry in the Old Testament. Verses 21-24 are the famous turn: "But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope." The turn comes only after the lament has been allowed to stand.

Read Habakkuk 1:2-4 — the prophet asking God why violence and injustice are tolerated. He addresses God directly: "How long, O Lord, will I cry for help, and you will not hear?"

Read Matthew 27:45-46 — Jesus on the cross, quoting Psalm 22, crying the words of lament with his last strength. The Son of God, dying, prays a complaint psalm. The pattern of Christian lament has Christ at its center.

Reflection

The Bible has a literary form most modern Christians have never been taught. It is called lament. Roughly a third of the Psalms are laments. The book of Lamentations is one. Job is one extended lament with a frame. Many of the prophets contain laments. Jesus, on the cross, prays one. And yet most contemporary worship services have no place for this form. We sing songs of praise, songs of victory, songs of declaration — and almost no songs of complaint. We have curated the Psalter down to the parts that are easy to sing in a major key.

The result is that ordinary suffering Christians, when they find themselves in seasons their worship music does not address, often conclude that something is wrong with them. They cannot sing the songs. They cannot say the affirmations. They suspect their faith has failed. What has actually failed is the church's curation of the Psalter. The lament tradition exists. It has always existed. We have hidden it from each other.

Psalm 88 is the most extreme example. It is the only psalm in the entire collection that does not end with hope. It begins, "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!" — a strong opening of address. Then it descends. The psalmist's soul is full of troubles. He is counted among those who go down to the pit. He has no strength. He is among the dead. God's wrath lies heavy on him. His companions have left him. He is shut in. And the last verse — the place where every other psalm of complaint pivots toward hope — does not pivot. "You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me; my companions have become darkness." Period. End of psalm. The Holy Spirit included this in Scripture and the church has prayed it for two thousand years.

This is not a psalm of weak faith. It is a psalm of honest faith inside an unrelieved season. The psalmist is still praying. He has been crying day and night. He has not stopped addressing God. But he refuses to manufacture a resolution he is not feeling, and the Spirit refuses to manufacture one for him. The psalm stands as Scripture's permission slip for the seasons in which the lament does not, on schedule, become praise.

There is a difference, the church has always taught, between Psalm 88 and the murmuring of the wilderness generation. The Israelites in Numbers complained against God to each other — they grumbled — and that grumbling was unbelief. Psalm 88 complains to God. The address is everything. The same words spoken behind God's back are sin; spoken to his face, they are prayer. Job, Jeremiah, Habakkuk, the psalmists, and Jesus himself all complain to God's face. They are all praised for it.

Tim Keller, working from the Hebrew tradition, defines lament as the discipline of refusing both denial and despair. Denial says "everything is fine." Despair says "nothing will ever be fine." Lament says "things are not fine, I am taking it to God, and I am refusing to walk away." It is a third option that most Christians have never been told exists.

Notice how Lamentations 3 works. The book is a sustained funeral over the destroyed Jerusalem. Chapter 3, the book's center, is the deepest cry. The poet says God has driven him into darkness, made his flesh and skin waste away, broken his bones, walled him in, made his chains heavy, shot his arrows into his kidneys, filled him with bitterness, made his teeth grind on gravel. This goes on for twenty verses. The complaint is detailed, anatomical, relentless. There is no smoothing it over.

And then, at verse 21: "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 hope arrives. But notice when it arrives. Not at the beginning. Not as a denial of the suffering. Not even early in the chapter. It arrives only after the lament has been fully expressed. The text gives the suffering its full hearing first. The hope is real precisely because it is not a substitute for the lament; it comes through the lament.

This is the rhythm chronic sufferers need. We have been trained to skip to verse 21. We start there. We tell each other "great is your faithfulness" before we have allowed verses 1-20 to stand. The result is that the hope feels thin, because it is being asked to do work it cannot do. Lament makes the hope possible. The hope of "great is your faithfulness" arrives in a person who has just spent twenty verses describing how it does not feel like God is being faithful. That hope is hard-won. The hope skipped over the lament is cheap.

Spurgeon, who knew lament from the inside, preached often from Psalm 42 and Psalm 88 and Lamentations 3. He gave his congregations permission to be in the dark. He told them that the Christian who can sing in the noonday sun is a small kind of Christian; the Christian who can hold on to God in the midnight, when everything is dark and nothing is felt, is the deeper kind. The lament tradition produces this deeper kind. It is the school God uses to grow saints in the long winter.

What does the practice of lament look like for someone in chronic pain?

First, it means letting your prayers tell the truth. If you are tired, say so. If you cannot understand why this has gone on for years, say so. If you feel forgotten, abandoned, exhausted, raging, numb — bring those exact words to God. He has heard worse. He inspired worse. He included worse in his book.

Second, it means using the Bible's own language. Psalm 88 is yours. Psalm 13 ("How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?") is yours. Psalm 6, Psalm 42, Psalm 102 are yours. Job and Lamentations are yours. The imprecatory psalms — the ones we are sometimes embarrassed by — are yours. They are the church's prayer book, and they were written, in part, for you.

Third, it means refusing to short-circuit the lament. Do not let well-meaning friends rush you to verse 21 of Lamentations 3 before you have prayed verses 1-20. The order matters. The hope is more solid when it has come up out of the depth, not been pasted over it.

Fourth, it means remembering the cross. The deepest lament in the Bible is Jesus' "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" — and it is also a quotation. He is praying Psalm 22, the very psalm of complaint that ends, eventually, in vindication and praise. He is in lament and in faith, simultaneously. He is fulfilling the lament tradition by living it. When you pray your darkest psalms, you are praying with him. He has been there. He prayed those words first.

The God of Christian faith is not embarrassed by your complaint. He has authorized it. He has prayed it himself. He has included an unresolved lament in his Bible so that the Christian in unresolved suffering would have somewhere to go. Today, if you cannot sing, you are still allowed to pray. The Psalter has the words for this exact day.

Going Deeper

Pray Psalm 88 aloud, slowly, the entire psalm. Do not edit it. Do not soften it. Do not append a verse from another psalm to make it end better. Let it end the way it ends. Then sit in silence for a few minutes. The work the psalm is doing in you is happening underneath words. Trust it.