Lament as Faith — The Lost Discipline of Holy Complaint
Roughly a third of the Psalms are laments. The book of Lamentations exists. The cross itself is wrapped in a psalm of complaint. Yet many modern churches sing only happy songs and treat sorrow as a problem to be solved on the way to victory. This plan recovers the biblical discipline of lament — not as despair, not as venting, but as a peculiarly Christian act of faith addressed to a God who can take it.
If you sat with a Bible and a stopwatch, you would notice something the modern worship industry has nearly hidden from us: the Psalter is not mostly sunny. Roughly a third of its 150 psalms are laments — protests, complaints, demands that God explain himself, reports that the night has not ended. Psalm 88 is the only one that does not turn toward hope. Lamentations is an entire book of grief over the destruction of Jerusalem. The longest meditation on innocent suffering in the Old Testament — Job — is mostly the sufferer arguing with God and being permitted to keep arguing.
Then look at the average modern American worship set. We sing about victory, breakthrough, freedom, dancing, joy. All of it true; none of it the whole truth. And many believers, sitting in those services with cancer, with depression, with a marriage in collapse, with a child they have buried, find that the church has handed them no language for where they actually are. They learn to fake it through the singing or quietly stop coming. The discipline that sustained two thousand years of saints — lament addressed to God himself — has gone missing.
What to Expect
Seven days through Scripture's lament tradition: Psalms 13, 22, 42, 88, 137; Lamentations; Habakkuk; Jesus on the cross praying Psalm 22; Paul on godly grief in 2 Corinthians 7. Spurgeon writing, sometimes from the pulpit and sometimes from his sickbed, on the place of melancholy in the Christian life. Calvin's deep pastoral instinct that the Psalms are "an anatomy of all the parts of the soul." Augustine on weeping. Tim Keller on the difference between lament and self-pity. The aim is not to produce sad Christians. It is to give grieving Christians their language back.
Who This Plan Is For
For anyone in grief, anyone walking with the grieving, anyone in a season of depression, anyone whose church has made them feel they must wear a smile to belong, and anyone who has begun to suspect the absence of lament from modern worship is one reason the modern church can feel so thin.