Learning to Pray a Prayer of Lament: Bringing Our Pain Before God

When we find ourselves in pain, we naturally tend to cry out. A prayer of lament is one of the ways we cry out to God when we are in distress or having a “dark night of the soul.” There are many examples of prayers of lament in the Bible, with over fifty of the Psalms being laments. “In the world, you will have trouble,” Jesus told his followers.

Between dealing with the realities of sickness, death, loneliness, conflicts, abuse, disappointments, injustice, and much else, there are so many things in the world that bring us sorrow, and one of the ways we can respond to it is to use the prayer language of lament. In his final hours before being crucified, Jesus lamented before God.

What is lament? Lament is about more than simply crying out in pain. Crying out in pain is an instinctual response, but lament is about finding hope even in the darkest of times. When we lament, we are praying to God and bringing our anguish before him. Lament is not just a cry we utter into a void, but a cry directed toward God.

We can find lament all over the Bible, from the Psalms to prophets such as Jeremiah, and scattered prayers in books such as 2 Chronicles. There is also an entire book of lament called Lamentations, and we also find the book of Job full of lament as the titular character wrestles with the hardships in his life.

Why do we lament?

When a small child gets hurt, typically they cry for or run toward their parent or caregiver. They know that if they cry out, help will come. They trust that someone cares for them, and they will not be left alone. When we cry out in lament, we do so because God cares for us and is in control.

We trust that God hears our cry, even if our cry is that we feel like God isn’t hearing our cry, as many of the Psalms do. “How long, O Lord, how long? Why do you stand far off?” goes Psalm 13. Even if we feel like God isn’t there, lament is a cry that we utter in faith that God will hear us even if we feel he’s far away from us.

For some people, they may feel like lament is not something a believer should do. Surely, our prayers are meant to be full of thanksgiving and joy, aren’t they? Without a doubt, our prayers are meant to be laden with praise and gratitude for who God is and the many blessings poured out into our lives.

However, the Bible reminds us that there is a time and a season for every activity under the heavens (Ecclesiastes 3), and that includes mourning and weeping. The Psalms not only give us the language of lament to speak in certain life situations, but their very presence also permits us to speak like that. Otherwise, why would God put it there?

On the cross, Jesus spoke quoting Psalm 22, a Psalm of lament, saying, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” At that moment it was the appropriate thing to say and do. When we are faced with danger, hardship, cancer, loneliness, death, addiction, abuse, failing relationships, or any other experience of the brokenness of this world, turning to God in a prayer of lament is the appropriate response of faith.

Have you ever been hurt by someone? You may know that the right thing to do is forgive them, but that is often hard to do. Saying you forgive them or praying a prayer of praise feels false to how you’re really feeling. True, we sometimes need to guide our feelings towards the light but ignoring how we feel has its dangers.

Often, believers deal with their negative feelings by pretending that everything is fine, that they can pray away their negative feelings. You may succeed in that for a season, but it’s not helpful or truthful to do so. Those feelings are real, and it is better to recognize and deal with them now than risk burying them and have them pop up later in destructive ways in your relationships.

If you read the Psalms long enough, you’ll find that some of the prayers of lament contain angry statements – the kind that don’t seem like they belong in the mouth of a believer, let alone in the Bible itself. Lament allows us to express those negative emotions constructively by placing how we feel before God and leaving it in his hands.

Instead of being quick to praise when you have stuff in the basement, it is better to address your pain and anger honestly through lament, and in that way your forgiveness, when you offer it, is genuine.

There is another reason we lament. Sometimes, the things that happen in our lives just seem either too big for us to understand, or they seem utterly senseless and beyond our comprehension. It’s easy to give simple pat answers to complicated and messy life situations. But we know that those answers are inadequate, for ourselves and for others.

We want to find meaning, but sometimes the meaning of things like death, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, deep injustice, mental health challenges, or abuse escapes us. In our search for meaning, we can be tempted to look for cheap and easy answers to help us regain control over the situation.

Lament reminds and teaches us that there are some things we do not understand and that we cannot understand because our human minds can only comprehend so much and take us only so far. As much as we want it to be so, God does not dispel our confusion or sorrow by saying, “Don’t be afraid, because you will understand everything and have all the answers you need.” At times, the best we can do is no more than simply lay our confusion before God, and lament helps us to do that.

Our world is broken, and things are not the way they are supposed to be. To pretend otherwise is to set ourselves up for disappointment. Our health, the health of our loved ones, safety, and wholeness are blessings we don’t always enjoy. When those things aren’t present in our lives, it doesn’t mean that God doesn’t love us, or that it is punishment for disobedience.

In our moments of darkness, our faith is tested, and we can feel alone, confused, abandoned, and in doubt. A lament is an act of faith when we are in the dark – it is the refusal to despair and the expression of a deep-seated desire to continue trusting God even in tough circumstances.

We lament because even if we do not experience God’s closeness in those times of trouble, we believe that God does care for us. We lament because even if God seems not to hear, we believe that God is always within shouting distance and our cries will reach him. Prayers of lament are the language of the faithful when they are under pressure, feeling overwhelmed, and struggling to cope.

Learning to pray a prayer of lament

We often look to examples to see learn something is done. The Psalms are a wonderful place to start. In most Bibles, Psalms of lament are labeled as such, but you can start your journey towards understanding and using lament by looking at Psalms such as 6, 10, 13, 22, 38, 77, and 130.

These Psalms illustrate lament over a wide variety of life circumstances, such as feeling sorrow over our own sin, feeling abandoned by God or by people we considered our friends, and more. By reading and rereading these Psalms, we can become familiar with their language, and some of it might become your own as you pray your laments.

As you read these Psalms, it may become apparent that they have certain elements in common, such as taking a complaint before God, asking him to intervene, and trusting that God will hear and act. It may take some time, but you can learn to pray and write your own laments that fit your circumstances based on the pattern shown by the Psalms.

In that way, the Psalms and other laments can teach us how to pray in a way that draws from the deep and rich wells of the Bible and the experiences of God’s people.