Not long ago, my Bible-reading plan took me through the book of Lamentations. When I reached the end, I had one immediate thought:
Boy, I could’ve used this when I was a missionary.
The book of Jeremiah warns of and then witnesses Judah’s collapse under divine judgment after generations of unfaithfulness. Lamentations then follows by sitting among the ruins of Jerusalem and grieving what has been lost. Neither book offers the kind of immediate encouragement we often hope to find when we open our Bibles.
We know how to turn to Scripture for answers and reassurance. We are less practiced at allowing Scripture to teach us how to grieve: how to name what has been lost, protest what is broken, and remain open when no resolution has come.
As a cross-cultural worker, I was trained to carry the book of Acts as my textbook. In retrospect, at times Lamentations would have been a more fitting field guide.
To participate in God’s mission is to be drawn close to suffering—our own and that of the people and places we love. It means growing more painfully aware of the distance between the world as it is and the world as God has promised it will be.
The Christian spiritual discipline of lament is how we abide with God in that distance.
When the Warnings Are Not Enough
Cross-cultural transition makes the limits of warning especially visible. Before I moved to East Africa, I had been told that missionary life would be hard. Later, as a pastor, I repeated many of the same warnings to others: language learning may be slow; loneliness will come; ordinary tasks can become exhausting; you might not feel like yourself for a while.
All of this can be true even when arrival is accompanied by genuine joy. A new culture offers beauty, discovery, friendships, and the privilege of entering another way of life. But delight does not cancel disorientation. Within a remarkably short time, missionaries can lose many of the things that once helped them feel grounded: familiar relationships, cultural fluency, vocational competence, daily routines, and the dignity of being understood.
There is, however, a great difference between being told something will hurt and being taught what to do with the pain. Warnings may help us recognize transition shock when it comes, but recognition is not formation. Knowing that grief is normal does not automatically give us a practice of bringing it before God.
Those who cross cultures with the gospel can heighten awareness for this need because so many losses arrive at once. But the need is not unique to them. Any form of following Jesus into the brokenness of the world means absorbing troubles that cannot be quickly solved through preparation, explained away by good theology, or overcome through sheer determination.
The question is not simply whether we have been warned. It is whether we have learned how to abide with God in the mess.
On the eve of his death, Jesus did not merely warn his disciples that sorrow was coming. He gave them words to remember, promised them the presence of the Holy Spirit, and offered them a peace unlike anything the world could give (John 14:25–27). Christian preparation for suffering has always required more than prediction.
A warning can tell us sorrow is coming. It cannot teach us how to sing from within it.
Lament gives grief a song.
The Gift of Lament
This is a song that runs throughout Scripture. Job protests, the psalmists cry out, the prophets grieve, and Jesus takes the anguished words of Psalm 22 upon his lips from the cross. Nowhere, however, is that song sustained more fully than in Lamentations.
We must listen to it carefully. Of course, the disorientation of cross-cultural transition is not equal to the catastrophe that gave birth to these poems. Missionaries generally leave home voluntarily. The people of Jerusalem endured siege, starvation, death, the destruction of their city and temple, and exile under divine judgment. To ignore the difference between those experiences would diminish the suffering Lamentations records.
Yet their grief does not need to be identical to ours for their words to become our companions. Christian mission inherently brings us to places where the distance between the world as it is and the world as God has promised it will be is painfully obvious—often in the lives of those we serve and sometimes in our own lives.
Lamentations teaches us not to look away.
Biblical lament is more than emotional processing. It is worship offered from within that confusing distance. It voices the specific losses, objects to the sense of injustice and confusion, pleads with God to act, and continues addressing him even when there are no answers. Lament gives sorrow sacred dignity without granting it the final word.
The Sound of Lament
Lamentations does not offer a step-by-step process for moving beyond this sorrow.
It’s more like a meandering blues track.
A line is voiced, repeated, bent, and heard again from another angle. The lyrics are raw, yet held within a form sturdy enough to carry them.
The five poems of the book revisit the same devastation through shifting voices, recurring images, and prayers that rise and fall. They return to the ache, sometimes discovering mercy within it and sometimes ending in awkward tension. These are not stages to complete and leave behind. They are movements to which we return as often as grief requires.
Four of those movements are especially worth hearing.
Name What Was Lost
Lament begins with eyes wide open. In the first poem, Jerusalem appears as a widow whose entire world has collapsed:
“Look, O Lord, for I am in distress; my stomach churns; my heart is wrung within me…it is like death” (1:20).
Later, the fourth poem is so bold as to look backward before surveying the devastation:
“Her princes were purer than snow…Now their face is blacker than soot…The hands of compassionate women have [now] boiled their own children” (vv. 7-8, 10).
Again and again, the poet measures the present by what once was. He does not bury his head in the sand. He names the excruciating distance between then and now.
Such comparisons can feel spiritually dangerous. For any of us who have left something behind in missional obedience, we may fear that remembering the past will make us despise the present. We worry that acknowledging what we miss will weaken our resolve to remain. Perhaps we will quit and go home.
But lament is neither nostalgia nor self-pity. It allows us to confess that something good has been lost. Grief does not necessarily mean we regret our obedience; often, it testifies to the worth of what obedience has cost.
Missions culture sometimes says, “Don’t look back.” Lamentations grants us permission to do so—not to retreat into the past, but to tell the hard truth about the present.
Pour Out the Sorrow
The second poem holds together a difficult truth: even though Jerusalem’s judgment is deserved, her lament is justified. Lamentations does not excuse Judah’s rebellion. Yet neither does it tell the grieving city—like a parent might sneer at a child—to take the punishment and like it.
“Arise, cry out in the night, at the beginning of the night watches! Pour out your heart like water before the presence of the Lord!” (2:19)
The image is startlingly unrestrained. Water does not come out in carefully measured drops. God does not shout like Tom Hanks’ character in A League of Their Own, “There’s no crying in baseball!” He says to empty the heart before him.
Those who suffer in the course of obedience often struggle to believe they have that permission. We chose to go. We knew it would be hard. A voice—sometimes our own, sometimes from those around us—says, “Others are suffering far more.” The comparison silences us. We swallow it like some chalky placebo: hard to get down and powerless to heal.
But a gracious Father does not confuse grief with ingratitude. He does not scold his heartbroken child when her balloon floats away. Rather, he draws her into his arms, measuring the loss not by his standards, but hers. Perhaps he feels his fatherhood even more keenly when his shirt is wet with her tears.
Lament is sorrow with an address stamped on it. It pours the heart out not merely into the air, but upon a loving Father.
Wait for Mercy
The third poem opens with Israel as a lonely, broken man: “I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of the Lord’s wrath” (v. 1). By verse 18, he has reached the bottom: “My endurance has perished; so has my hope from the Lord.”
Then, from somewhere inside the rubble, he remembers:
“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
‘The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul,
‘therefore I will hope in him.’
The Lord is good to those who wait for him,
to the soul who seeks him.
It is good that one should wait quietly
for the salvation of the Lord.” (vv. 22–26)
These words are not spoken after deliverance arrives. Nothing outside the speaker has changed. What changes is what he calls to mind. Hope enters not as the denial of his anguish, but as the stubborn remembrance of God’s character from within it.
My, how the missionary will wait! Wait to understand and be understood. Wait for unfamiliar faces to become friends. Wait for the body to acclimate to unfamiliar foods and climates—and to recover from yet another illness. Wait for seeds of faithful service to show any sign of life.
Such waiting can feel like wasted time. Lamentations teaches us otherwise. Waiting is not the absence of fruitfulness. It’s where the long, bewildering stretch of bare soil becomes a seedbed of hope.
Refuse a False Resolution
To our surprise, the final poem offers no happy resolution. It closes with a plea in which faith and uncertainty cling to one another:
“Restore us to yourself, O Lord, that we may be restored!
Renew our days as of old—
unless you have utterly rejected us,
and you remain exceedingly angry with us” (vv. 21–22).
And then, silence. No happily ever after. The final note hangs unresolved.
And according to Holy Scripture, that’s ok.
Yet each time missional people risk sharing their sorrows with me, I notice that they often conclude with something like this:
“...but we’re doing well.”
“...but God has been so kind.”
“...but we know it will all work out.”
I understand the instinct. These are genuine expressions of faith.
But I also wonder if they have become our way of slipping out of grief before it grows uncomfortable—as though God, our supporters, or even we ourselves need reassurance that the sorrow has not gotten the best of us. We tie the bow that Lamentations refuses to tie.
But uncertainty directed toward God is not the opposite of faith. It may, in fact, be the more hard-wrung expression of it. The poet continues speaking to God even when he fears the worst. He pleads, “Restore us,” and then dares to name the terrifying possibility: “unless you have utterly rejected us.”
Lament does not require us to smuggle optimism into the final sentence. It permits the prayer to end while the ache remains. Holding nothing back—anger, confusion, even despair—can itself be an act of gritty trust: the conviction that God would rather receive our anguish than our polish.
In the company of Jesus, we may cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Learning to Remain
Perhaps I am still asking too little of Lamentations. It is more than a companion for surviving cross-cultural transition. It belongs to the whole church. In a sense, we are all learning to live between two worlds.
Acts teaches us to go. Lamentations teaches us how to remain. Both belong to faithful mission.
Name what was lost.
Pour out the sorrow.
Wait for mercy.
Refuse a false resolution.
These do not silence the gospel song. They just keep it honest as we wait.1
This essay is adapted from an article originally published by Upstream Collective.
So good! If I could name the most important thing I learned my 12 years on the field, it was lament.
Nicely done!