What is the Antidote to Fight or Flight Reactivity?
“If you don’t learn how to lament your own ministry, you won’t survive it.”
The phrase landed like shards of glass into the collective consciousness of the room full of pastors and ministry leaders. Our professor, a South African man named Jaco Hamman paused to let us catch our breath.
We shifted in our chairs a bit. It was one of those statements that we all knew was true, but we couldn’t articulate why.
Up to that point, few of us had ever considered the word “lament,” let alone imagined it might have anything to do with ministry or our personal lives.
Lament is a foreign word to most of us in the West. An obscure word. But what if I told you that 40% of the Psalms are songs of lament? What if I told you that churches in other cultures know lament intimately and practice it often? (See Soon Chan-Rah’s book, Prophetic Lament on this topic).
We don’t really know how to lament very well in the West. Because where strength and achievement are idolized, weakness, failure, and disappointment need to be masked, not embraced and exposed before God.
But what if God could use lament to save us from our idols of achievement, strength, and perceived ability to fix the suffering in the world?
Lament is an active letting go of other Messiahs that we try to cling to in order to save us: our achievements, our circumstances, our relationships, our politics, our ministries, even our compassion. All must be surrendered before God in lament.
So - what is it?
Lament is an active surrendering to God in the midst of grief and sorrow.
It is the process of crying out to God in the midst of pain. It exposes the darkness and brokenness in the world and within us for what it is. In lament, we bring the suffering in the world to God and ask Him to do something about it.
In lament, instead of grasping and controlling, we learn to release and receive.
Lament: The Antidote to
Fight or Flight Reactivity
In our last post, we discussed that when pain hits us, we either fight to fix the problems in the world or flee from them. But both of these reactions are rooted in a false narrative of who we are and who God is.
When we fight, we unwittingly believe we can be a Messiah and save ourselves, or worse - the world. This is rooted in pride.
When we run, we unwittingly put more stock in evil’s ability to overcome us than Jesus’ promise to overcome the world. This is rooted in fear.
But is there another alternative? I believe the answer is lament.
When we encounter suffering, our temptation is to fight it or run from it, but I believe Jesus invites us to lament through it.
Lament stops us in our tracks so that we can face suffering with God. No fighting, no running, just sitting in it with Him.
It is where we lie there before Our Lord Crucified, our cracked shell open and vulnerably exposed before Him and cry, “Lord, bring the rain.”
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Lament and the False Self
When we allow Jesus to seep in like living water, we swell and expand - becoming more than we were before we were broken. And little by little, we start to transform and outgrow the shell of our false selves.
Suffering may crack the shell of our souls, but God’s living water seeps in through the cracks in lament.
Lament is where we stare darkness in the face and say “this isn’t the way it was supposed to be. This is ugly and broken and wrong. But Jesus is here in the midst of it, and I will turn to Him.”
It’s where we experience Jesus as the Emmanuel (God with us) in the darkness. The God who left the throne of heaven to enter our dusty, messy world. He joins us in the darkness and says, “here I am.” It is here we receive the gifts of His presence, His healing, and His truth that seep in through the cracks in our lament.
In lament, we receive Jesus, the suffering servant who bore evil, death, and darkness upon His shoulders. The Jesus who submitted himself to suffering for our sake. We receive the gift of His suffering with us, and he says to us, “You want freedom? Hope? Life? Redemption? Then you meet me here at the Cross.” We receive His presence and silence as He sits in the tomb with us. And His love and compassion for us seep into the cracks.
On the other side of lament, we receive the resurrected Jesus who conquered sin, death, and evil. We receive the gifts of His freedom and power that make all dead things come alive and all old things new. And at this point - we burst forth from the shell.
We leave it behind as we become something new through lament. A new creation.
Lament Transforms Us into Something New
But here’s the thing - it always goes in that order: death, then resurrection. We can’t get to the resurrection without first entering into death with Jesus. Paul explained it this way in Philippians 3:10-11,
“I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.”
Paul says we come to know Christ by participation in his sufferings and being like him in his death. It is only through this journeying through suffering that we encounter resurrection in life.
Side note: Most of us in majority white culture in the West haven’t understood what it is to suffer as a community. Individually maybe, but not as a people group. Not like most other countries and not like ethnic minorities. One of the ways we can participate in Christ’s suffering is by entering into the pain and suffering of others - especially those who have lived their whole lives under oppression and know suffering in their bones. Those who suffer much have much to teach us. Let’s sit in it with them and listen.
Ok - back to lament and how this helps us enter into suffering to know Christ.
Kinstugi and Lament
Recently, I listened to a Veritas Forum where Makoto Fujimura, a profound visual artist and writer describe the process of making kintsugi art. Kintsugi is the art of repairing shattered pieces of pottery by mending the areas of breakage with gold.
Fujimura works regularly with a kintsugi artist, and in his workshops, the kintsugi teacher would invite students to bring in broken pieces of pottery to class. He would say to them,
“You came in to fix something, but we aren’t fixing anything. We are going to behold the brokenness. We are going to look at the fissures and we are going to hold the fragments for a while. And then we are going to think about mending to make it new.” Fujimura noted,
“This is a proper way to lament.”
Photo Credit: @vesperillustration
There is something mysterious that happens when we surrender to God in lament. In His beholding of all the fragments and broken pieces with us, together He works to create something new through them.
But when we rush past the process of lament, we operate out of our false selves - our fight or flight reactivity that takes human approaches to pain and suffering. We often try to muscle through it and conquer it. We try to be victorious over it. But, what if God just wanted us to enter into it and allow it to transform us? Could it be that God might actually make us something new through our lament?
Could He take the shattered pieces of our anger, our sadness, our loss, our disappointment, and our dreams and somehow mend them together to create new life? I believe He can. And I’ve seen him do it.
“Lament is the seed of creativity. It’s the seed of genuine, creative action.”
I heard Andy Crouch say this on a Veritas Forum at the beginning of the Coronavirus Pandemic. And I believe he is right. I believe God has all kinds of new creative ideas He wants to stir through our lament. The creative ideas that get unlocked in lament can not only create beautiful things through us, but lament shapes us into the beautiful creations we were meant to be.
Reflect:
What is wrong within your life or in the world that is crying out in pain? What might it look like for you to set some time aside to enter into that pain and lament with God?
What new thing might God want to birth in and through you in lament? What new dream could be waiting on the other side of your journey with Him into the darkness of lament?
Is there something I need to confess? What am I believing right now? Are these beliefs true? What would be different if I chose to believe the truth?
Pray:
Lord Jesus,
Help me to enter fully into lament - to lament what is broken in my life and in the world. Help me to encounter you there, Jesus as the Immanuel who is with me in the darkness, as well as the one who suffered on my behalf. Help me to trust that as I join you in this, you will bring a resurrection on the other side.
Amen
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