Faith May Start With A Wound

Grief can make you feel like you’ve been exiled to a place no one else has ever been. When people try to help by saying “I know exactly how you feel,” it can land like a second loss, because your pain is not a template. I’m Candy Lucas, a chaplain and spiritual director, and I want to slow down with a part of the Bible that refuses quick fixes: the Book of Lamentations.

We walk through why Lamentations may be one of the most pastoral books in Scripture for Christian grief and mourning. These poems are born after Jerusalem’s collapse, written from inside the devastation, and they begin with a wound instead of a solution. We talk about how that honesty challenges the habit of rushing to Romans 8:28, and why real grief support starts with presence, not explanations.

Then we name what many believers are afraid to admit out loud: anger at God. Lamentations models raw prayer without pretending it is polished testimony, making space for faith and loss to coexist. At the center, we explore the famous line “Great is your faithfulness” and why it is not a mountaintop slogan but a remembered truth spoken from the rubble. We also face the book’s unresolved ending, and what it means to live a “theology of the middle” when your story is still unfinished.

If you’re mourning or walking alongside someone who is, listen and let lament speak. Subscribe, share this with a friend who needs permission to be real, and leave a review so more grieving hearts can find the circle.

SPIRITUAL DIRECTION WHILE GRIEVING IS AVAILABLE :  candeelucas@soulplusgrace.com

ATTEND MY SUMMER WORKSHOP ON "SOULFUL LISTENING" THROUGH THE MARKEY CENTER AT SANTA CLARA UNIVERSITY VIA ZOOM.

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Transcript

Welcome And Purpose Of The Show

Candee 0:38

Welcome To Solace: Soul Plus Grief. I'm glad you're here. My name is Candee Lucas. I'm a chaplain and spiritual director. When we started this podcast more than four years ago, we'd hoped to develop a library of information for those who are grieving, whether it be new fresh grief or many years since your loved one died. We hope to have information that will soothe your soul, ease your mind, and keep that vital connection. Remember, you're always welcome in our circle of healing love and support. Today we're going to discuss how the Book of Lamentations support those who mourn. There is a moment in grief that almost everyone recognizes. When someone sits beside you, looks you in the eyes, and says, I know exactly how you feel. And something in you wants to say, no, you don't. Not because they're unkind, but because grief, real grief, feels utterly singular. It feels like a place no one else has ever been. It is isolating by nature. And then there's the added weight of not knowing what to do with it, especially in a community of faith. We believe in the resurrection. We believe in the hope. We believe that God works all things together for good and touches us in our daily lives. So what do we do with the days when none of that feels true? What do we do when we open our mouths and only a cry comes out? The Bible has an answer. It's a short book tucked between Jeremiah and Ezekiel. One that rarely gets preached from Sunday morning pulpits. It is raw, unresolved, and at times deeply uncomfortable. It is called Lamentations. And I want to suggest to you today this book may be one of the most pastoral documents in all of Scripture. Precisely because it refuses to rush past the pain. Let me give you a brief orientation to the Book of Lamentations before we go deeper. It is a collection of five poems written in the aftermath of one of the most catastrophic events in Israel's history. The destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonian Empire in 587 BC. The city had been besieged, the temple burned to the ground, the people either killed or marched into exile. Everything they had built their national identity and spiritual life upon had collapsed. The poems are written as acrostics in the original Hebrew. Each verse begins with a successive letter of the alphabet. It's as if the author is saying, I will grieve from A to Z. I will find words for every part of this. The structure itself is kind of a testimony that there is a shape to grief, even when the grief feels shapeless. Who wrote it? Tradition attributes it to the prophet Jeremiah, sometimes called the Weeping Prophet. The author is never named in the text itself, but what is striking is that whoever wrote it, they were not writing at a safe distance. They were inside the ruins. They were riding from within the devastation. This is the first gift of Llamentations. It offers to mourners the fact that it was written by someone who was not okay. Turn with me to the very first verse. — How deserted lies the city once so full of people, how like a widow is she who once was great among nations. No preamble, no theology, no context setting. The book opens with a cry of desolation. The word how in Hebrew, aika, is the word used in ancient Israel to begin a funeral song. It is the sound you make when language almost fails you. It is closer to a gasp than a sentence. And I want to pause here because this matters enormously for those of us who come alongside people in grief, and for those of us who are grieving ourselves. The book does not begin with a solution, it begins with a wound. So often our impulse, especially in a Christian community, is to move too quickly to comfort. Someone shares their loss, and within moments we're offering Romans 8.28. Someone breaks down and we hand them a tissue and a theological framework. We mean well. But what we sometimes communicate without intending to is your grief is a problem to be solved, not a reality to be witnessed. Lamentations refuses that move. For five whole chapters it sits in the rubble. —-See, Lord, how distressed I am. I am in torment within, and in my heart I am disturbed. My eyes fail from weeping. I am in torment within. My heart is poured out on the ground because my people are destroyed. I am the man who has seen affliction by the rod of the Lord's wrath. He has driven me away and made me walk in darkness rather than light. Indeed, he has turned his hand against me again and again all day long. This is not polished testimony. This is not, I was in a dark place, but now I want to tell you how God brought me through. This is a man still in the dark, writing from that dark place. And the very fact that these words make it into the canon of Scripture sends an extraordinary message. Your grief belongs in the presence of God. You do not have to clean it up before you bring it. Lamentations doesn't just permit grief, it permits something we are often far less comfortable with. Directed, honest anger at God. It says the Lord is like an enemy, he has swallowed up Israel. It says, like a bear lying in a wall, like a lion in hiding. He dragged me from the path and mangled me and left me without help. These are not metaphors softened by distance. This is the author saying, I feel like God has become my predator. I feel hunted, mauled, and abandoned. Now and this is critical. Lamentations doesn't endorse this as a final theological conclusion, but it does do something profoundly important. It models expressing it. For many grieving, one of the loneliest experiences is the anger they feel at God, and the shame that surrounds that anger. They've been taught implicitly or explicitly that anger at God is dangerous, perhaps even sinful, so they suppress it. They perform a faith they do not feel. What lamentation shows us is that honesty with God, even raw accusatory honesty, is not the absence of faith. In many ways, it is the faith in extremis. You only cry out to someone you believe is there to hear you. And here is the pastoral implication. When someone in your life is angry at God in their grief, the most helpful thing you can do is not to defend God's honor. God does not need you to defend him. What the grieving person needs most is the sacred space to be honest. Now I need to take you to the very center of the book because this is where something extraordinary happens. After two chapters of unrelenting lament, we arrive at the middle of chapter three. And right in the heart of the book, right in the geographical and structural center of this poetry, something shifts. I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall. I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me. Yet this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope. Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness, I say to myself. Therefore I will wait for him. That's chapter three, verses nineteen through twenty. You know those words. Great is thy faithfulness. We sing them, we put them on cards, we embroider them on cushions, but do we know where they come from? They come from the rubble of a destroyed city. They come from a man sitting in the ash of everything he loved. They come not as a triumphant declaration from a mountaintop, but as a whispered resolve from the valley floor. Notice the language carefully. The author does not say, I feel hopeful. He says, I call this to mind. That is not an emotion that has spontaneously returned. This is a deliberate act of remembrance, a choice to reach back into what he knows to be true, even when he knows it cannot be felt. This is one of the most honest portrayals of hope in the entire Bible. It is not hope that has bypassed grief. It is not hope that has gone through grief and found something still standing on the other one. It is hope that has gone through grief and found something still standing on the other side. Now here is the part of lamentations that most surprises people when they encounter it for the first time. The book does not end well. At that moment of hope in chapter three, the grief returns. Chapter four recounts the horrors of the siege again. And chapter five ends with one of the most haunting petitions in all of Scripture. Restore us to yourself, Lord, that we may return. Renew our days as of old, unless you have utterly rejected us and are angry with us beyond measure. This is chapter five, verses twenty-one and twenty two. The final note of the book is a question, an unresolved plea. The curtain comes down not on celebration but on longing. This is deliberate, and it is one of the most important gifts the book offers. Because grief, real grief, does not resolve on a timeline. The loss of a child, the end of a marriage, the death of a dream, the diagnosis that changes everything. These are not chapters that close neatly. And a faith that can only accommodate tidy endings is not large enough for the real human experience. Lamentations gives mourners permission to be unfinished and incomplete. It says you do not have to have arrived at peace in order to still be in relationship with God. You do not have to resolve your lament in order for your lament to be heard. That prayer, the one that ends with a question mark, is still a prayer. So what does lamentation offer to those who mourn? It offers language for the days when no words come. Here are some words that have gone before you. It offers permission. You do not have to be okay. You do not have to perform hope you don't feel. You do not have to protect God from your honest heart. It offers community. These poems are likely read communally, publicly, together. You are not meant to grieve alone. It offers a theology of the middle. The hope of chapter three is not found by skipping through the grief of chapters one and two. It is found on the other side of them. The path runs through, not around. And it offers an open door to God, even when the last word is a question. It is asked of the God who we are told and believe is compassionate, is faithful, and whose mercies are new every morning. If you are mourning today, or if you are walking alongside someone who is, do not be afraid of lament. Do not rush it, do not silence it, let it speak. Because as lamentation shows us, the cry that reaches heaven does not have to be clean. It just has to be real. Remember, the Lord is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him. It is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. That concludes another episode. A new one drops every Friday morning. You can find us on Amazon, Spotify, and Apple Music. I'm Candee Lucas, your host. Travel with God always near you.