How should we grieve?

Our culture does not handle grief well at all. We in the church don’t do much better. “Out there,” they tend to wallow in it, ignore it, or numb themselves against it. “In here,” we offer clichés, slap on promises like Band-Aids, and awkwardly withdraw from people in pain.

The Bible offers a different approach for handling our grief: the lost language of lament. Lament is everywhere in the Scriptures, once you start noticing it. Somewhere between one-third to one-half of the Psalms are laments. Most of the book of Job is lament. The book of Lamentations is one extended lament. Most major characters in the Bible pour out a lament at some point. So when was the last time you took your burden to God as a self-conscious lament?

Lament offers us a vocabulary to help us face and understand our grief. It furnishes us with a set structure that helps us express our grief, yet at the same time keep it restrained within appropriate boundaries. It can be a powerful tool to unite our grief with faith and draw us deeper into relationship with God.

Before I explain what a lament is, let me be clear what it is not. A lament is not a dirge. It’s not an unrestrained outburst, giving free reign to our emotions. It is not the same as venting.

A lament is a structured expression of grief, confusion, and longing. It’s a protest, a complaint, an appeal, based on the gap between my own experience and expectations—expectations grounded, not in what I want, but in something of God. The basis for lament is the character, the promises, and/or the ways of God. When life doesn’t match what we would expect from God, lament is the only honest, biblical response. In other words, a lament is a prayer, sung or spoken to Someone. It’s an expression of faith-filled relationship.

Laments in the Bible are composed of five elements: address, complaint, request, rationale, and praise. Next week I’ll give more detail on these elements, but for now, notice where the structure ends. There’s a specific aim, a trajectory to biblical lament. It starts with pain and ends with praise. This means that lament is somehow one of the most direct paths to confidence in God that we have available to us in our grief.