“Lament: /ləˈment/ a passionate expression of grief or sorrow.”
—dictionary.com
“Isn’t it horrible,” two residents chime in unison at the long-term care facility where I make a pastoral visit. They point to the television, tuned to the news of the Texas school massacre.
I had stepped into their room after walking down the hall, having prayed with a resident in her final stage of life, who questions why she is still here, why dying lingers, why it won’t release her from this life to the next.
We lament for the ones who are ready to meet their Lord and for the others—-the innocent children whose precious lives a gunman so ruthlessly snatched from them.
We lament our world, for it is a harsh world, peppered with lightning strikes that kill the unsuspecting, cancers of all kinds and varieties that ravage the once healthy. And we lament tortured souls who commit evil atrocities. We know the slow, painful deaths and witness the sudden ones that jolt us. We lament that we cannot seem to change it, this world we live in, this world that operates on an imperfect template. We lament that no matter how much we try, the wrong still pokes its ugly head out of the dark abyss, and mocks our efforts.
Only a few days ago, I was rubbing my brother’s swollen feet with a towel I’d soaked in cold water. He felt hot, one of his cancer’s effects as it intensified its attack. It had invaded his liver, painting his skin a jaundicy, pale yellow.
“I don’t want to go through this,” was the closest he came to complaining. Nodding my head as I listened, I thought of Jesus in Gethsemane’s garden, “Father, if you are willing, please take this cup of suffering away from me” (Luke 22:42). And I hated that my brother had to experience the cup of suffering.
Knowing that the Lord chose not to escape his journey brought me some solace, for our Lord traveled to the Other Side in victory. And he did go through with it. He did accomplish his mission. And the angels announced his resurrection to the highest heavens, promising us hope.
For some, death comes much too early, leaving childhood rooms decorated with toys and baby books and shattered dreams forever unfulfilled. For others, death lingers and hovers, and only after a fight, at last latches onto the arms of the sufferer, relinquishing them to their everlasting appointment in the afterlife.
But in the very act of lamenting, there is the acknowledgment of joy and happiness that’s been displaced by sadness. If our world were perfect, there would be no sadness and no reason to grieve. In this vale of tears in which we live, we still have reasons to smile, occasions for laughter, and reunions with loved ones from way back when. And we have hope. Always hope.
A perfect world would have no pain, no heartache, no mosquito bites, no skinned knees, no cancer, no crazed shooter, no deaths. Every story would end happily ever after. And that would be another world, not the one we know, not this world with flawed and vulnerable people. What would joy be if we knew nothing else, didn’t know life without it?
And so, we lament, yearning for what could have been and what we hope will one day be.
My brother lamented his pain in the hour of death, setting his tired eyes on the wife he had to leave too soon, gazing into her eyes with a love he could not let go but had to. And yet, he didn’t complain.
Ann Voskamp said: “Lament is a cry of belief in a good God, a God who has His ear to our hearts, a God who transfigures the ugly into beauty. Complaint is the bitter howl of unbelief in any benevolent God in this moment, a distrust in the love-beat of the Father’s heart.”
“I’ll see you in the morning, big brother,” I said as I placed one more ice chip in his parched mouth, kissing his forehead. I no longer waited for him to speak; his voice was all but gone.
Winking at me, Lowell closed his eyes, and forced a smile.
And I turned and walked away.