Lament Is a Kind of Faith

The last dish went back on a Tuesday. A blue casserole dish, washed twice, dried properly, left on a doorstep with a note because she could not manage the conversation.

For about three weeks the house had been full. People came with food nobody could taste and stood in the kitchen and said the things people say, and some of them were beautiful and some of them were terrible and she cannot now remember which were which. There were cards on the mantelpiece. Someone organized a rota, and there was always a car outside.

Then the rota ended, the way rotas do, because everybody has their own life and none of them were wrong to go back to it. And she noticed one afternoon that the phone had not rung in four days, and that when she saw a friend at the shop the friend asked how she was in the past tense, gently, as though the answer were a thing that had already happened.

And then there is the prayer. She used to be good at praying. She had a chair for it. Now she opens her mouth and what comes out is not what she was taught to say. What comes out is where were You. What comes out is I do not understand what You were doing. Last week she got two words in and stopped, because the third word coming was going to be an accusation, and she thought, that cannot be prayer, and she got up and put the washing on instead.

You know that chair, and you know the sentence you stopped yourself from finishing. You may have decided, quietly, in the last few months, that you have lost your faith, because faith did not used to sound like this. So sit down here with me. The mugs have gone cold and nobody is going to hurry you. And let me say something about the thing you nearly said to God.

The complaint is inside the covenant

I am going to stay down here for a while before we go anywhere, because grief is the place where people rush the lift, and a lift that arrives before the pit has been looked at does harm.

So here is the pit, as far as I can see into it.

There is the thing itself, which does not get smaller. And then there is everything nobody warned you about. The tiredness that has nothing to do with sleep. The way your own kitchen has become an obstacle course of small ambushes, because a mug is not a mug any more, and a coat on a hook is not a coat. The sound of your own voice saying it out loud in a shop and having to comfort the person who asked.

There is the calendar, and the arithmetic of months, and the way everyone else's clock is running at a different speed to yours. There is the terrible relief when a whole hour goes by without it, and the guilt that arrives immediately behind the relief, like it was waiting in the corridor.

There is the second bereavement nobody names: the people who did not know what to say, so they said nothing, and now too much time has passed for them to start.

And there is the part you have told no one. Some days you are furious. Not sad. Furious. At the hospital, at yourself, at the last conversation, at the person who left, and at God, and that last one frightens you most, because it feels like the one thing you are not allowed. You are not in trouble for it. Nothing written about you changed on the day the anger arrived. The Spirit has been sitting with you inside that fury the way He sits with everything else you have not said aloud.

Now let me tell you what is actually in the Bible, and let me be very plain about it, because the church you grew up in may not have shown you this shelf.

There is a book in Scripture called Lamentations. That is its name. It is not an appendix and it is not a warning. It is five chapters of a man walking through a destroyed city saying so, in detail, without softening it, and it was kept, and it was copied by hand for centuries by people who thought it belonged there.

And roughly a third of the Psalms are lament. How long, O LORD? Will You forget me forever? That is not a heretic. That is a psalm, in the songbook, meant to be sung out loud by the congregation. Somebody set that to music on purpose so that people would have words for the worst nights of their lives.

And when Jesus stood at the grave of a man He loved, He wept. Knowing what was about to happen, He still wept, which tells you that grief is not unbelief and He has never treated it as such. And at the very end, out of His own mouth, came the opening line of a lament psalm: my God, my God, why have You forsaken Me. That sentence is a complaint, and it is addressed to God, and it is the holiest thing ever said.

So look at what your angry prayer actually is.

You are still talking to Him. That is the whole point and everybody misses it. People who have genuinely stopped believing do not complain to God. They go quiet. They stop using His name. They talk to friends, or to nobody. Complaint is a covenant word. You can only accuse Someone you are still in relationship with, and you can only ask where were You of Someone you still believe was meant to be there. Your rage is upward. It has an address on it. That is not my sentiment about you. It is how Scripture has always handled a complaint, and the Spirit takes those words the rest of the way up when they come out in no order at all.

Which means the thing you have been reading as the loss of your faith is your faith, still working, in the only register that is honest right now.

And here is where the anchor sits, and I want you to notice where it sits in its own chapter. The line everyone quotes comes after twenty verses of unbroken grievance. He has said that his soul is bowed down. He has said that his hope has perished. He has said things about God that would get a person quietly spoken to in most churches. And then, without taking any of it back, he says this:

The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22 to 23

He did not arrive there by cheering up. He arrived there through the complaint, not around it. The mercy line is in the same chapter as the accusation, in the same voice, on the same day.

I am not going to tell you what this loss was for. I do not know, and anyone who tells you they do is standing somewhere they have not earned. I am not going to hand you a reason, or a lesson, or a silver lining, and I am certainly not going to tell you what happens next.

What I can tell you is that mercies come new every morning, including the mornings you did not want to be awake for. Not as a cure. As bread. Enough for the day you are actually in. Lamentations 3:22 was written by a man who had not stopped hurting when he wrote it. Into a kitchen on the afternoon nobody rings, the Spirit brings a line like that.