fighting fear with truth

You came near when I called on you;

you said, ‘Do not fear!’

“You have taken up my cause, O Lord;

you have redeemed my life.

Lamentations 3:57-58

The most abundant command in all of scripture is repeated for us right here in this passage: “Do not fear.” I’ve done the biblical research and this is a fact. God knows our hearts. He knows we need His presence and person with us. And when He comes near He comforts us with this reminder to not be afraid. So how does this fit into biblical lament?

I am surprised at how much fear has come to me along with grief. They are not a pleasant combination, in case you were wondering. In fact, confronting fear has been the biggest task I have needed to do in order to now gain momentum and a sense of a good future. It is usually what I wind up talking to my counselor about, in one form or another. It is what has made me regularly seek God in my struggle. It has gripped me in a few sleepless nights along the way. I need this command to not fear! 

I am grateful to Ed Welch and his book, “Running Scared”, for this insight: Deliverance from fear starts by naming our fears, shining God’s truth on them, and knowing what fear is saying to us. Often what I fear is not based on known fact. It is a fabrication of my imagination gone wild. When I counsel others on fear I ask them to name the fears and write out what the fear is saying, to then refute the lie. And so, here are a few fears I’ve had to confront. They don’t overwhelm me anymore. They do still like to pop up in tired and weak moments.

“I will always be alone.” This is the worst one. And it tends to grow bigger at night. But the truth is… I am never alone! I never have been alone! Jesus is with me always. God’s Spirit lives in me. To combat this fear with the truth I 1) recognize God’s presence. 2) pray out loud (it really does help). 3) cultivate friendships and talk with people a lot more than I used to. 4) stay active because physical activity seems to generate a healthy perspective, particularly when I can do so outside and in a natural setting.

“I just depress other people.” Again this is a big lie. The truth is every day I am surrounded by people who honestly care for me, even when there are moments I am obviously a little sad. And they often tell me how I encourage them. And more times than not, I have good news to talk about. So I combat this fear with truth and make myself spend quality time with people. I do need to cultivate SOME solitude, but if I am finding it dragging on me, I try to find a new friendship. It is very healing.

“I’m just stuck here… it will never change.” No… I am not stuck. I am waiting on the Lord. There is a big difference! And that perspective turns the experience into a time and place of beautiful and powerful worship. God will lift this fog of uncertainty. God will build the bridge forward a few planks at a time as I continue to trust His engineering! God will be my courage. These fears will not rule my heart when I am clear on the truth and driven by it. And so fear is fought with God’s truth!

God brings the grief

For the Lord will not

cast off forever,

but, though he cause grief, he will have compassion

according to the abundance of his steadfast love;

for he does not afflict from his heart

or grieve the children of men.

Lamentations 3:31-33

These observations about God need to be understood in the context of God’s judgment. Nonetheless, there are insights into God’s care for the hurting that apply in other pains. We need to read these insights with three truths specific to Jerusalem’s historic judgment in mind: 1) At this point in biblical history, Israel had for several generations rejected God’s rule and His law. 2) God patiently and passionately warned them through prophets. There were several small cycles of repentance that slowed His judgment of them. 3) God’s judgment, when it did finally arrive, was severe in spite of the generations of patience on His part. So their suffering ended up being severe as well. They only had themselves to blame at that point.

I am not sure that I can fully know then the exact kind of grief that Jeremiah laments in this book. Christ has taken all my judgment on the cross. I DO NOT believe that any of my present difficulties are a divine judgment upon my sin. But I do still have a level of suffering. Yet even with this faith perspective applied to my situation, I see in the promises made here several comforting principles rooted in the character and the purposes of God.

1. Grief is only a season. It does not last forever. Any difficulties now are temporary in the light of the big picture of my life, and certainly not even a blip on the timeline of eternity. I am hopeful that just as winter always changes into spring, this season will turn slowly and beautifully because God does not cast off forever. 

2. God takes responsibility for our seasons of suffering. This passage directly says God brings what causes grief. He knew what He was doing! He knew how I would be right now and in His wisdom and in His love meets me in the grief I have from what He has caused. He is in control then, and though I may not like where I am, I love that He is always here with me!

3. God brings compassion and grace to what He has caused. And this is the insight with the most comfort! It is why Job could say, “The Lord gives… the Lord takes away… blessed be His name.” I have known God deeper and better in life’s hard times than I have ever known Him when it has all been so easy. This is a precious thing!

4. Even judgment is not God’s first desire. He is patient. He does not willingly grieve or afflict us. I trust His heart on this, and believe that this is the case. I refuse to EVER be angry at Him or with Him, knowing these things about Him.

I’m waiting…

“The LORD is my portion,” says my soul,

“therefore I will hope in him.”

The LORD is good to those who wait for him,

to the soul who seeks him.

It is good that one should wait quietly

for the salvation of the LORD.

Lamentations 3:24-26

Coming on the heels of conviction that God is gracious, loving, and faithful, this next set of lamentations observations provides perspective on the hardest part of suffering… the hardest part is endurance. And the hardest part of endurance is waiting on the Lord. If I am honest, this is where I am now, and have been in various capacities since January 4, 2023.

There are two strategies for waiting that I see in these three verses. The first strategy is what I call “corrective self-talk”. Jeremiah instructed his own soul first… “says my soul” is a personal strategy. We must force ourselves into litanies of faith, putting a certain playlist on repeat in our minds. We should be rehearsing without stopping true songs of hope! Jeremiah just repeats two mantras: “The LORD is my portion.” “I will hope in Him.” And that is what one must do while working through grief and suffering. While waiting well, we engage faith. We refuse to let our souls dwell at length upon negativity. We slap ourselves to faith’s reality. “I WILL HOPE IN GOD!” This corrects our tendency to deep dive into the murky depths of the coldness of our misery.

The second strategy is to “concentrate on goodness.” The LORD is good to those who wait. In the moment, while I am waiting, God is (present tense) good! Yes… He is! We will bring good. He will reward the waiting. He will Himself be that reward. He cannot be anything less than holy, loving, gracious, and merciful as a Father to those who hurt. But we must wait. Also, as hard as it is to accept, the truth is that verse 26 is the infallible Word of God: It is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. It is a good thing, even in pain, even in lament, to wait for God’s time of healing and salvation.

When Joni was first diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, we knew all we could do was wait. We waited together in hopes that perhaps medicine could give us two more precious years. When that was not what God had for us, we waited for what extremely precious words and time we could have… to fill our remaining days with as much love and faith a possible. And now I wait alone, with God, for God to continue to help me understand and unfold what my future holds. I said at the very beginning of all this that the rock star Tom Petty was an insightful theologian: “The waiting is the hardest part.” But now I really do trust in this: The waiting, even after loss, will be the good part. God says it is so. I believe it. I am starting to see it. I know it is good, not because I enjoy the wait, rather it is because I am upheld by the God for Whom I am waiting, and He is very, very good!

“… therefore I have hope…”

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.

Lamentations 3:21-23

Lament, when truly focused on God, will make a sweet refreshing turn to hope. That is what Jeremiah did as he languished over all the death and destruction in his life around the fall of Jerusalem. He wept and mourned. He poured out his grief, his disbelief at the appalling remnants of pain, his feelings of confusion at God… all of these were directed to God as Jeremiah flooded heaven with his memories and mourning. And God’s Spirit brought to mind a hope for him that overpowered even the most persistent pains.

It is important to realize that in choosing lament, we also choose hope. Jeremiah mourned with frustration, fear, and heartache while simultaneously turning to the God of hope. The pain was real. And thankfully, so was the hope! So when we mourn and lament what feels so very awful, we too can eventually experience a real, consistent, and lasting hope.

Let’s briefly unfold this fourfold hope. In the perspective God provides we can move beyond lament to a true hope because:

1). God’s grace never ceases. The steadfast love of God (Hesed in Hebrew) will not cease, even in the sinking, seeming finality of our losses. God will still be gracious to us as we look to Him, even if the best that our souls can find in prayer is complaint. God will always be gracious. Always! This is very important to know and believe.

2) God’s mercies are endless. That means even if I struggle to properly worship God, to keep my heart where it should be, God understands. He forgives in mercy because in my confused seeking He still loves me. It is never a bad thing to turn to God… never! It is always the best thing to do, and we will find mercy!

3) God’s loving grace and mercy are both new every day. I get no leftovers in His love! God pours out new morning mercies… fresh, vibrant, and pure just for our unique needs. He counts us as precious in our pain, custom tailoring a mercy to fit our experiences!

4) God’s faithfulness is great. My faith often slips. My hope fades. My trust can be so meager in my pain. “Oh me of little faith!” But God cannot be less than greatly faithful to those who are in Christ! He keeps covenant! He calls me back in my weakness. He loves me still in my faltering. It is not up to me, but ALL up to Him and that is why I have hope! Great is His faithfulness in all lament.

Remember my remembering.

Remember my affliction and my wanderings,

the wormwood and the gall!

My soul continually remembers it

and is bowed down within me.

Lamentations 3:19-20

Biblical lament cannot remain mere complaint. It must focus reflections and remembrances of suffering to a better place. It must bring them to God. This lament marks a turning point in the book of Lamentations. The prayer here starts to move biblical lament to that better place. It does so by praying that God would remember what the sufferer remembers.

What is remembered, and what is asked of God to be remembered are experiences of pain in the midst of grief. Four defining sorrows are asked to be remembered by God. Two are actual descriptions of experiences, two are metaphoric, all of them are personally painful.

1. Remember my affliction. The first appeal is for God to see, understand, and recognize suffering. The word used here for suffering denotes primarily the mental misery that is suffered. It might be more accurately translated: “Remember my depression.” God… my soul is troubled, sad, miserable, wrapped in negativity, and broken.

2. Remember my wanderings. One is tempted to see this as confession, something like, “Lord, my soul has moved away from You.” But the word used for wandering is more akin to the concept of an outcast. A more realistic translation is this: “Remember I am a refugee.” God… my soul is homeless. I am lost. Suffering and loss have so transformed my landscape that I feel I am a man without a country of my own.

3. Remember my wormwood. Wormwood is a very bitter herb. Likely hemlock, a poison, Hebrews used it as a metaphor for being cursed. God… I am bitter, untouchable, undrinkable, a wormwood curse to those around me who struggle to touch me as they fear they too might have to know my pain and misery. I am a poison because in me they see the potential for their own loss… a pain they cringe to ever receive. I used to be the same way.

4. Remember my gall. Gall was used as a numbing agent. It was mixed with vinegar and offered to Jesus on the cross. He refused to be numbed in His suffering. But grief may lead us to try unsuccessfully to numb our suffering in a multitude of appealing ways. Sirens sing to allure us with beauty and false songs in an attempt to numb us, only to wreck our souls further on the rocks of misery. God… You know my many unsuccessful and sin-filled attempts at relief. I am disappointed that I have disappointed You. By seeking to briefly numb my pain, I have only made it worse.

Bringing these experiences to God is indeed the turning point in lament. I accept that all of them have been true of me, and the next loss I experience, I will be tempted to see them amplified in me. I must trust that praying for God to remember what I remember begins to bring a new way to me… a way of healing… a way of mercy… a way of new life. Thus in turning to God, I engage faith, which is the only way out of these four defining sorrows.

Lament is not for the weak.

Their heart cried to the Lord.

O wall of the daughter of Zion,

let tears stream down like a torrent

day and night!

Give yourself no rest,

your eyes no respite!

Lamentations 2:18

True lament is a cry rising up from the deepest of emotions. It is a cry from the heart. It cannot be manufactured, faked, or forced. It must well up from our deepest grief and sorrow. Lament needs emotions to truly drive it… emotion and fathomless loss.

The emotions that fuel lament can vary. Sadness is not the only one. Lament is often a witches brew of various feelings: anger, outrage, injustice, pain, grief, comparison, frustration, loneliness, bitterness, depression… virtually any personal, powerful negative feeling. Bubbling up from a soul that has reached its emotional boiling point, the heart cries. Lament focuses itself though. It focuses specifically WHERE and to WHOM the heart cries. 

The Lord is the direction of true lament. I cannot lament to others. They may lament with me. More likely though, others will watch my lament in emotional impotence, for rare is the friend who shares enough of the same emotional ingredients of my personal lament. MY heart cries out. MY heart has the hurt. MY heart laments. Yes, corporate lament can happen (it does in this verse: “THEIR heart cried to the Lord”) but only those who truly feel the depths of emotion will really lament together.

And the stream of tears pouring down the faces of lamenters are unmistakably intense because lament is not for the weak. A raging torrent of sorrow and pain floods the faces of those in lament. And the call of this verse is to NOT hold back (very counter-culture, especially for masculine stereotypes)… let the tears flow… give it no rest… open the hydrant of tears day and night in relentless lament for as long as you need to do it! And as long as the cry is to the Lord, the tears will flow in the right direction. Crying out to people alone just turns into self-pity and a desire to manipulate sympathy. I have had to repent of this motivation, and I still fight it. But in strong lament, from strong emotion, feeling powerless to see change, I can in lament begin to gain a better strength. Crying out to heaven thus brings a sense of purpose… it engages a tear-filled form of faith, and is precious to God as lament turns to the only place to find some beginning of relief, some bit of perspective, some thread of hope.

the precious things that were

Jerusalem remembers

in the days of her affliction and wandering

all the precious things

that were hers from days of old.

When her people fell into the hand of the foe,

and there was none to help her,

her foes gloated over her;

they mocked at her downfall.

Lamentations 1:7

In 1931 Salvador Dali painted a bizarre dreamscape of surreal melting watches across a wasteland entitled “The Persistence of Memory”. The painting is a masterpiece of modern art, drawing the viewer to contemplate not only the passage of time, but the plastic nature of our memories over time. It has always interested me that the artist chose the bleakest of desert landscapes to capture this message. It conveys the reality that the memories that persist may be tinged most with loss, regret, pain, and difficulty. And so it is with biblical lament. Difficult memories should be expressed in our cries to God… especially when we feel them coming from our driest places.

In this passage the broken, widowed, limping Lady Jerusalem remembers her worst loss. She weeps in her affliction in the aftermath of traumatic assault. She mourns those fallen at the hand of the foe. She grieves that no one came to help her and instead she was gloated over, humiliated after her assault, and mocked at her ruin.

Sandwiched in the middle of all this pain-filled lament is a tenderly tragic mental anguish: She remembers “all the precious things that were hers from the days of old.” This is heart-wrenching. It is exactly what happens to those who grief the people they have lost who are dearest to them. It is what is left after a major traumatic event. The city of Jerusalem, pictured throughout the first lines of Lamentations as a once noble princess, has been beaten, raped, traumatized by watching her defenders killed in front of her eyes. She has been mocked, stripped, and ridiculed by cruel attackers. Yet in her head, unable to be consoled, are countless precious memories of what once was… the past splendor… the past beauty… the past joys… the past loves… the precious things. Her attackers might leave her wounded, naked, unsheltered, and alone, but they cannot rob her of those precious memories. The best things that still persist in extreme loss are precious memories. 

Biblical lament must recognize that remembering those precious things we have lost, taking persistent memory to the Lord both in gratitude for having had them, and in tears for having lost them, is a way to find His perspective in the loss. It helps us to persistently hold onto His good in what is still precious to us. It helps us to mourn. The “precious things that were” become helpful anchors to hope IF we will pray into those persistent memories, thank God for them, mourn for their loss, accept that things have changed from those days, own ways in which we have wrongly idolized the memories or disobeyed God during those times, and release to God a willingness to trust Him that new precious things can emerge from what He will renew from our loss.