The Rest We Seek

“Ekhah!”

This is how the book of Lamentations begins. It’s a harrowing cry of grief to the Lord because of the destruction of Jerusalem and the desolation that followed. Imagine everything about your identity—every part—being stripped from you in this way. What do you say to your God who is the core of everything you are and hold dear?

While my late husband, Duwayne, was in seminary, he enjoyed teaching me some of the things he was learning. I have a distinct memory of him dramatizing, “Ekhaaah!” with his fists clenched, eyes shut tight and mouth wide with the wail of Israel. It was prophetic, in retrospect, that the kind of pain he described to me at the time is what he would endure almost for the rest of his embattled life.

A wail. This is what lament is. But it is never a single occasion. And in communities of faith, it is always unto the Lord. Although defined in a word, lament can be as complex and unsearchable as our bodies, spirits and our connectedness in a created world full of pain. It does not look the same for any two people, yet as God’s children, we are called to a common, ongoing exploration of our mortality afforded to us by death, trauma, mistreatment or other pain. We are called to wail to our Heavenly Father by whom all things seen and unseen are made, and by whose hesed—steadfast love—we must come to terms with in the context of our grief.

Ekhah means “How” and is the beginning of this song of lament generally thought to be written by the prophet Jeremiah. It is used to begin a cry, not a question, “How deserted lies the city, once so full of people!” The weeping prophet’s incredulity is a demand from God who does not answer to anyone, but chooses to answer his people. Jeremiah, from whose mouth came both the prophesy of destruction and the wail afterwards knew all too well from whom, to whom and by whom—all things—for the people of God. He understood why Jerusalem was destroyed. Still, he demanded to be heard and was confident he would have audience with the Lord.

But instead of living out our faith as Jeremiah did by running to the Lord, we often turn away. While grappling with my husband’s cancer and our lives before he died, I wrote a long poem, Aching for the Amen, in which I reflected,

o lilting shadows of leaves and light
your peace misleads my fear
that is not misplaced.
when i leave this place,
i will forget the cool of the day.

While in prayer a little over a year after his death, the Lord reminded me that I had written these words. Although they were honest reflections, I felt that the last line, “i will forget the cool of the day” was a breach—sin. My contempt for disease, hardship and the possibility of death at the time led to contempt for who I blamed and who I needed the most.

In Genesis 3:8, Adam and Eve “heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day.” It was no accident that like Adam and Eve, my primal fear of the worst would result in open rejection of fellowship with God. My sin was instinctual. I felt justified in my anger because my life was falling apart.

What exactly is God doing while we are doing our worst, or while the worst is happening to us? We are offended at the very sound of God. We are offended at the sound of God walking. We are offended at the sound of God walking in the cool. We are offended at God walking in the cool of the day while he should have been hard at work preventing our whole lives from being flipped upside down. We seldom admit that we want to lay the deep pain of our lives squarely at God’s feet. And I’m not talking about a cast your cares type putting things at God’s feet but How husbandless I am, and fatherless my children are!

Another thing my husband mused over was our Lord as being moved by our pain yet unmoved in who he always has been and always will be. One of my favorite passages is Psalm 34:18, “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.”

“Where are you?” he called after Adam and Eve while walking in the garden.

Where are you?

God’s question is an invitation to show up in whatever state we find ourselves. God called first, meaning that he pursued Adam and Eve knowing full well what they had done, and what the consequences would be. After hiding (as we are also accustomed to doing), they told the truth to the Lord who was the core of everything they held dear. Here we see that both Lamentations and the account of fall demonstrate that for the people of God, turning to him is the only recourse, even when our sin is the cause of the trouble upon us. How much more, then, should we run to the Lord when it’s not our fault, when a loved one dies, when we’re hurt by someone or experience betrayal?

There is no circumstance that we can afford to go it alone. We can’t afford to ignore the call of God to tell him what’s wrong. Will God not make garments of skin to cover you? Will God’s love not save us from being consumed as the prophet writes in Lamentations 3:22? I believe the answer is yes for both. So wail in protest, anger, disbelief, sadness, whatever comes, because there’s no other path to the rest we seek. Lament is the natural expression of our deep dependence on God which is counter to our not-so-brave-quest for self-sufficiency—a quest that is never ending and never fulfilling.