The Lament

Have mercy, Lord.

Have mercy in our streets and in the cells of our bodies.

Have mercy for the mothers of stillborn angels and all those who are learning to form their goodbyes with laden tongues.

Have mercy in the deserts of waiting for deliverance to the Promise and from the grip of the Enemy.

Have mercy for our neighbors, the ones stolen off the street and the ones bombed into ash.

Have mercy on my enemy, Lord.

Break the darkness with Your gentle light.

If I really stop to think about it, the grief has, of course, been building. But when I woke up yesterday morning, the grief took me a bit by surprise. It was a heaviness in my chest I couldn’t quite shake. I wanted to lie in bed all day, and chalked that feeling up to a busy week followed by a late night and an early morning. But as the day progressed, and I completed my meaningless work and freelance tasks, I realized the experience I was having wasn’t a dip into depression. It wasn’t anger or bitterness. It wasn’t tiredness or a consequence of a busy life. It was grief.

If you asked me what the grief was rooted in, I would probably tell you that it would be easier to say what the grief was not rooted in than to tell you all it has sprouted from.

Grief is not from the friends and family I’ve made across my life, who love me well and truly more than I deserve. Grief is not from the love I’ve cultivated and lost. Grief is not in my history, as broken and dark as it is. Grief is not from my job, although sometimes working with the future can make me believe it is.

The grief is in the sidewalks where mothers are ripped screaming from their children’s hands and in the Christian response of silence or hypocritical gratitude that justice finally came for someone else. The grief is in the burning, piecemealed bodies of wars and genocides raging unchecked across the earth. The grief is in the industrial prison complex, which profits off of bad behavior. The grief is in the abusive pastors who cling to the pulpit with all ten knuckles until, finally, someone rips them off with words of truth turned into power and which fall, for the first time, on ears that choose to listen. The grief is in the stillborn child and in the disclosures of decades long sexual abuse hidden by a tortured mother and in the unsaltedness of the Church and in the homeless woman I drive by on the way to work. The grief is everywhere and it’s all the time and it’s unrelenting.

I peel my body off the couch where I’ve been working and take it to the shower, my lament playlist on full volume because I know this hard and holy work well. I listen to the LORD tell me repeatedly that my Savior knows what it is to grieve. His body was taken and nailed to a cross by corrupt governments and religious leaders who swore they were horning God by beating and killing God’s Son. The LORD tells me about the funerals he attended that defied His human logic. I’m told of the long days of what felt like empty ministry, asking people to repent and be saved who chose to cling to power and money and murder instead.

I step out of the shower and lay on the floor, wrapped in towels, asking God why, if God is in control, all of this is so damn hard. If I am in the Valley of the Shadow of Death and God is walking with me, why are we not going faster. And the LORD, ever patient, ever kind, just holds my hand on top of the bath mat and says “Because we’re not done yet.”

And then, like a flash of Divine Inspiration, I feel better because I have realized that this life is not supposed to be easy. I realize I was made for a garden. The job on earth, although sometimes light and merry and meant to be enjoyed with good drink, is also to get off the earth, and to bring as many people with me as I can.

I rise from the bath mat defiant because I know again what Jesus knew as He lay bleeding and battered on the cross. This world is not my home. Come, abusive pastors, come lazy and adulterous Church. Come warfare and tear gas. Come racists armed with Bibles. Come stillborn children and unimaginable heartbreak. Come impatient waiting.

We’re not done yet.