Words Creating Space

Writing has been a healing practice for me and a way to process the pain over my son’s death in June. Until this time, I have only written as a private exercise to acknowledge and express what I’m thinking and feeling. I feel that since this summer, I have been experiencing perpetual lament. Now that I have experienced my first season of Lent, and have just arrived home from church after our first Easter without Walker, I thought it a fitting time to share what I’ve learned about lament as it now colors the way in which I view everything.

I have learned that lament is not something that clouds my judgment so that I’m perpetually negative, but that there is power in lament because it validates the goodness of the object of my longing. Never before have I experienced such an awful separation from something that was such a source of joy in my life. My son, Walker was in the prime of his life – relationally, he had found the love of his life in Katie, and they were due to be married in a little over 4 months from his death; career-wise, Walker had hit his stride and was able to exercise his talents through his vocation; and spiritually, he and Katie had found special meaning in what their upcoming marriage would image of God to the world and of His relationship to us. Things went from good to chaotic in a flash.

Before Walker’s death, I had been spending much of my time meditating on Genesis 1-3. I was drawn to this passage in 2019 as I was preparing for a mission trip to Panama and was focusing on how to prepare my heart to enter into a place of economic poverty while acknowledging that I would bring my own spiritual poverty with me. This acknowledgment can be powerful as it can foster two-way ministry to occur as the lines between who is serving and who is being served are blurred. I never knew how important this concept of mutuality would become in informing my understanding of lament.

It turns out that the world needs our lament as it points to a longing for God’s original good intentions for the world and the fact that they are not currently being realized. The verse that revealed these original intentions to me is Genesis 3:22:

The Hebrew word for knowing in this verse is yada, or experiential knowledge. This understanding of yada led me to see this verse was God’s lament over the fact that mankind could now experience evil. I ended up writing on this verse before Walker died and found that it opened my eyes to the breaking of God’s heart for us in a way I had never noticed before. It revealed God’s original good intentions for me personally to experience His goodness and it was as if this understanding drew back a veil to expose a whole other world or reality that existed behind the world in which I currently live. This world is the one in which God’s good intentions for us are actually realized and it was the world God desired for us to inhabit. I never knew how much I needed to believe in this world because it is the world that I believe my first-born son inhabits and is now experiencing.

As this new reality pervaded every dimension of my reading of scripture, I was drawn to seemingly small details like the very first two verses of Genesis and their description of the world and how it came to be. The first verse of Genesis says that God created the heavens and the earth and then the second verse gives a view of the earth before creation was complete – describing it as formless and empty with darkness covering the surface of the deep, with the Spirit of God hovering over the waters. The second verse invites us to imagine a pre-creation state without the order that God would institute on earth through creation. The Hebrew word for this formless and empty state is tohu wa bohu, which translates as a chaotic nothingness. This understanding of a pre-creation, chaotic state helped me build a framework for conceiving of the chaos that had entered my family’s lives. I was beginning to be able to hold this conception of chaos in one hand while also holding God’s good intentions for us in another. I believe that these two verses in Genesis helped me imagine that without the order that God brought through creation, utter chaos would exist. I believe that disobedience of God’s law actually caused a serious unraveling of creation allowing chaos back into the system of order that God had instituted.

When tragedy entered my life, it caused me to question God’s goodness and I went through much wrestling with even the validity of believing in it. However, I could not deny all that God had been revealing to me about His goodness and of His deep lament over mankind’s experiencing evil. In the end, I decided that joining with God in lament united me to Him in a life-giving and profound way.

The picture of God’s spirit hovering over the waters also provided me with a mental picture of God’s presence and His process that presides over chaos. This picture quieted the fear within me that threatened to undo my faith. I realized that God was hovering over me and in being true to His nature, in His time, He would institute His order over the chaos which threatened to overtake my life. I have found this to be true as He’s worked through people and processes that are bringing life and hope back to me. However, this is a tender and sometimes tenuous process.

I believe if we are in tune with God’s intentions for the world and the fact that these intentions are currently unrealized, then lament is our proper response. There has been such life-giving power in this realization for me. I can’t help but generalize this notion to the Church as a whole and to its work in the world. It seems that in first approaching the world and its people through a posture of lament, the Church could provide a bridge to others who are also experiencing pain in their lives. There is healing in uniting together in grief and encouraging each other that what we long for is not an impossibility but is actually a longing we were created to have. Through Christ, our longing will be realized. Christ unites God’s good intentions for us with what our lived experience will be.

So on this Easter Sunday, Christian, or anyone fighting to hold on to something good in this season of life, don’t resist lamenting. Let it be the vehicle that unites you to the goodness with which this whole universe was conceived. We can hear it calling to us through all the budding and blooming and new life emerging in spring. Our time of complete unification with God’s good intentions is coming. Until then, don’t give up your longing for it.