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Podcast: How to Lament after Two Years of Loss (Mark Vroegop)

April 11, 2022 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Processing Our Loss

In today’s episode, Mark Vroegop considers what it looks like to lament the COVID-19 pandemic—and how that lament can help us heal, both individually and as churches.

Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy Devotional Journal

Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy Devotional Journal

Mark Vroegop

This devotional journal is an ideal companion for anyone wanting to apply the knowledge they learned about lament from Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy and practice it in their own life. 

Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy

Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy

Mark Vroegop

This book seeks to restore the lost art of lament in order to help readers discover the power of honest wrestling with the questions that come with grief and suffering.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:03 - How Do We Talk to God about the Sorrow That We Face?

Matt Tully
Mark, thank you so much for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.

Mark Vroegop
Matt, it’s great to be with you. Thanks for having me on again.

Matt Tully
I think the past two years or so have really, if I can put it this way, disabused a lot of us of the idea that we can control our world and what happens to us. Whether it’s the COVID-19 pandemic that we’re hopefully just coming out of now, the increasing polarization and disunity we see in our country and even around the world, and—even more recently—global conflict that has just been incredibly sad and scary to watch. All of that, and more, have really contributed I think to a sense that our world is chaotic, out of control, and we have very little control over that. Have you wrestled with those kinds of feelings over the last couple of years?

Mark Vroegop
Absolutely. I think every human being on the planet has, and that’s part of the challenge of what we’re all dealing with. We’re all grieving, in various ways, a whole host of things at the exact same time. I think before the global pandemic and everything else that we’ve dealt with over the last two and a half to three years or so, usually grief is something that has been individually located. Somebody loses a spouse or a child, or is battling through cancer, or has some marital conflicts. Those things are all real, but they were more individualized. Now we have the sort of global reality that we’re all facing, which theologically we knew was true. The whole creation is groaning. The difference is that now it feels like our ears have been tuned to hear it, and we’re all groaning together, or, to use the word that we’re going to talk about today, we’re all lamenting together. So yes, it’s been interesting to watch my own journey of moving from individual lament to a pastoral orientation about the subject. I’m just realizing this is a global reality that we’re all trying to figure out: How do we talk to God about the sorrow that we face?

Matt Tully
I want to get into that corporate form of lament that we can be feeling about things that are so much bigger than our own personal lives in a minute. One form of the feelings of helplessness that I think we can often experience in the face of these big tragedies and this large-scale suffering is that we can often have a desire to help. We want to do something, but we’re either not able to do anything because it’s such a big thing and so far away, or maybe we don’t even know what we could do. Even if we could do something, we don’t know where to begin. I think as Christians we often fill that space. We have a right answer to that. We say, Well, we can always pray. We can always go to God, talk to God about those things, and ask for his help in those things. But sometimes that just doesn’t feel very satisfying. I think we’ve all been there and maybe felt like that answer was a little trite or clichéd or simplistic. Can you resonate with those feelings?

Mark Vroegop
Yeah. I think every Christian, if they’re honest, does. I think that’s part of the challenge of what we’re facing in this moment is we really are not well-accustomed to how do we talk to God about some of the feelings, fears, and lingering effects of our sorrows on our understanding of spiritual formation and what it means to be a follower of Jesus. I think we need to learn the kind of prayer language that can be brought to bear in this kind of moment. Praise God that there’s renewed interest in the question, How do I talk to God when I’m really hurting? Not just in one moment, but in my entire life or when everything I see around me seems to be so incredibly broken. I think there’s a need to learn how to talk to God in those seasons, not only for our own spiritual survival but also because the Bible has a lot of language and a lot of prayers that connect to those kinds of seasons. That isn’t all that unusual for God’s people to really wrestle with the brokenness of the world around them.

Matt Tully
It seems like so often—at least for me-when I pray to God in the midst of some kind of trial or suffering in my life—I am praying to God and I am trying to trust God in that, but I’m also doing all kinds of stuff on my own to try to solve that problem. We go see doctors, we make that next appointment, we get on LinkedIn and try to find a job that we’re wanting. Sometimes we are going to God and praying to him, but it’s hard for us to disentangle our prayers from our own efforts to fix the problem that’s facing us. And yet, it seems like lament gives us this opportunity, especially in the face of things that are so obviously beyond our control, it gives us the opportunity to go to God and just lay it out there. We’re not looking for a solution as much. Do you think that’s fair to say that lament is often less solution-oriented than a lot of our prayers can be?

Mark Vroegop
Yes. I think lament in its essence is more process-oriented than what we’re familiar with. Lament doesn’t tie everything up in a nice bow. Sometimes it leaves the tension hanging in the air with unsolved problems, but a renewed commitment that I’m going to trust the Lord in the middle of all of this. While there are a bunch of things that I can’t control, a bunch of things that I can’t change or do, the one thing that I can do is talk to God. I can lay out what’s wrong, and I can tell him in stark terms: God, this is really hard. And I can renew my commitment to trust him even when the skies above seem awfully dark. That’s a beautiful language of prayer that we find throughout the psalms that really can serve to be life-giving to people when they’re really struggling.

Matt Tully
You call it beautiful and you call it life-giving, and I think maybe somewhat counter-intuitively it seems like you’re making the case in the book that when we approach God in that way—with that mindset of we are expressing our pain to God and not always looking for a quick fix—that that actually can be more comforting and more peace-giving than maybe the traditional way that we often approach him.

Mark Vroegop
One of the reasons that I wrote Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy was to help people realize that this is not only a language that you can use, but this language is all over the Bible. There are particular words, phrases, a way of approaching God when we’re in pain that is in the inspired text. One out of every three psalms is a lament psalm. The psalmists say some really gutsy and earthy things to God, and some things that we need to say. I’m looking right now at Psalm 109 which says, “Be not silent, O God of my praise, for wicked and deceitful mouths are opened against me, speaking against me with lying tongues.” If you’ve ever been slandered or defamed or you’re dealing with a justice issue, it’s really comforting to know that the Bible has that kind of language in it for us to come to God and say, This is really hard and really painful. The prayer language of lament, which I define as a prayer in pain that leads to trust, is super helpful because it leads somewhere, but it’s more about process and journey than it is about everything being all buttoned up into a nice, clean package.

09:02 - Defining Lament

Matt Tully
Let’s unpack this definition of lament that you’ve given there. In another point in the book you define lament as “how you live between the poles of hard life and trusting in God’s sovereignty.” Unpack that a little bit for us.

Mark Vroegop
I think the Christian life is in the space where we know God is sovereign but the world is also broken. Those two things don’t always go together really well. You know that God is good, but there are events in life that it’s hard to make a direct connection between this specific event and God’s goodness. It’s precisely because of the fact that we believe that God is sovereign and that we believe he’s good that Christians complain. We say to God, How long, O Lord? Would you intervene? Why haven’t you intervened? Rather than throwing that in God’s face—You need to intervene because I’m telling you you need to intervene—lament actually enters into the space to say, God, you’re sovereign. You’re in control. You’re all-powerful. And yet, this brokenness is right here. I want it to be gone. I want you to do something. Lament wrestles with pain while also looking to God as the ultimate answer for that pain, with the hope that we can really fully place our trust in him. So, a prayer in pain that leads to trust. Leads is really important. Lament is designed to lead us to a place when we’re kind of stuck between this pole, as I talk about, of God’s sovereignty and trusting in his goodness.

Matt Tully
Sometimes I think Christians can have a bit of a reputation for maybe downplaying pain or hard things that we’re facing or that we’re seeing in the world. We quickly pivot, perhaps, to saying things like, Well, God has a plan. God is sovereign. God is good all the time. In my experience at least, sometimes it’s been Christians who have been seemingly the least willing to acknowledge how hard a situation might be, and instead we just jump right to I guess what we would call trust. Do you think it’s important to follow that path and go through the pain, or embrace the pain, before we try to rush to, Well, let’s just trust God?

Mark Vroegop
Yes, and I think it relates to our whole understanding of what it means to be a faithful follower of Jesus. I think, sadly, that many Christians believe that being a faithful follower of Jesus means that you never struggle with doubt, you never wrestle with despair, you’re not battling anxiety on a regular basis. They come to church, people ask them how they’re doing, and they fake it: Oh, we’re fine! Praise the Lord! But inside, their spiritual life is a train wreck and they don’t think that it’s okay to acknowledge, I’ve got unanswered questions. I have tension in my soul about God’s goodness and what’s happening in my life. So, lament enters that rather complicated terrain by saying here’s a way to talk to God about that tension. A way that’s honest, a way that’s real, and at the same time, a prayer language that doesn’t allow you to stay where you are. It moves you along. It helps provide a progression towards a renewal of trust, while at the same time acknowledging this is really hard. The Christian life is a struggle, a battle, a fight—especially when you’re dealing with some kind of loss, deep sorrow, or really big unanswered questions that are really nagging and have an effect on your soul. Lament is the language that can help you answer, What do I do with this? Instead of despairing and thinking, Oh, I’m not Christian, or denying it like, No, I’m fine, lament says, No, let’s be honest, but let’s do something with this that helps us to lean more on God for our help and our strength.

13:00 - Is Lament a Lack of Faith?

Matt Tully
So far we’ve been talking about lament and having that mindset about the value of lament for ourselves as Christians. You’re a pastor, and I’m sure there are other pastors listening, there are parents listening right now, and loved ones listening. Have you ever struggled with the temptation as a pastor, a husband, or as a father to not recognize it when a loved one or a church member is lamenting in front of you—they are lamenting some difficult thing in their life—and the temptation is to jump in with the right answer or discourage them from saying these things to God because it seems like it’s maybe a lack of faith? Have you had to watch out for that in your own counseling?

Mark Vroegop
Yes. Absolutely. I can think of so many examples. In fact, I would argue that’s probably the normative position for most Christians, and maybe even most humans. There’s a reason for that, and that is that grief is really scary. When somebody is sorrowful and they’re mourning, there is just something within our humanity that feels threatened. We want that to stop, we want it to be fixed, we want an answer. We want control over the one thing that we can’t control, which is sorrow that’s ultimately connected to death that’s directly related to the presence of sin in the world. Whenever I come face to face with that reality of death and sin and sorrow—all of which Jesus is going to take care of at the end of the day—but in the meantime I’m struck with my humanity and my limitations. I can remember, as my wife and I walked through a huge loss in our life in 2004, there were moments when I wondered and I was afraid is she ever going to be happy again? Can our marriage survive this? Or a friend who is grieving the cancer of one of their children, and his gut-wrenching sorrow makes me really nervous. I know what he’s doing; I have a biblical category for it.

Matt Tully
You wrote a book on it.

Mark Vroegop
Right! And yet, it’s scary. I think that’s right. I think the question then is, What do we do with that? I think that fear, or that uncomfortableness and tension, is something that God has designed. I think lament is one of the languages that we can apply to know how to be able to care for people, how to lead them, and how to tune our own ears to hear, Oh, this is what they’re doing. They’re lamenting. We can enter into that space with them instead of trying to fix it, stop it, heal it, change it. Because most often the best thing we can do is just walk alongside with someone and lament with them.

15:52 - Wrestling with the Global Experience of Loss

Matt Tully
The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted virtually every human in the world in some way. It’s unprecedented, at least in our lifetime, for having that quality to it. For many the impact was incredibly severe. Some of those listening to us right now lost a loved one. Children missed out on important time in school and important opportunities for growth and development. People lost jobs, people have been isolated from their loved ones, and the list could go on. What does it look like for us to lament pain and suffering at such a large scale like that?

Mark Vroegop
What a great question. I think to lament at a large scale means that we need to be more prepared that lament isn’t going to go away. It’s not going to be situational. It’s not even going to be seasonal. It’s part of the air that we breathe because of the level of tumult and tension and problems that we face. It’s more of an age, an era. It’s not like the church has never been here before. There have been lots of periods in church history when God’s people were called to lament—and lament over a long period of time. We in twenty-first century Western churches are just not accustomed to that reality. We’re filled with this beautiful, buoyant but somewhat naive optimism that says, The sun is going to come up tomorrow! It’s a day of opportunity! The recession is going to go away. The stock market is going to keep climbing. Well, there have been plenty of examples throughout human history where recessions didn’t go away, the stock market didn’t climb back up during your lifetime, or your relational brokenness wasn’t going to be completely healed. I think part of what we’re wrestling with is not just the global nature of some of the losses that we face, but it’s that all of us are now into a new season where we’ve all lost something. One of our church members described it this way to me—I thought this was a really helpful illustration. She said that when she was a kid her family moved every five years. So, every five years or so there was a new church, new community, new school, new house, new friends, and that was traumatic. She described the last two years as having the same feelings but she didn’t move. Her church is different, her community is different, her school is different, her neighborhood is different; but she’s living in the same house. She said, Here’s the thing: we all moved at the same time. That’s the issue. It’s not just a few people grieving; it’s that everyone, in a variety of ways, are grieving. We’re lamenting, but in some cases we’re lamenting something different than someone else. Part of the challenge with grief is it can make you really myopic, kind of self-focused, and you can get really frustrated with other people who aren’t grieving the thing that you’re grieving. It’s just an opportunity—intensely so—for sanctification and for us to turn to the Lord and say, God, we really need your help. We needed your help before we knew it, but we feel it in a way now that is just really profound.

Matt Tully
Different people probably feel different emotions when they think back over the last two years. There is pain, frustration, discouragement, sadness, and maybe even anger over certain things. Is there space in lament for all of those emotions?

Mark Vroegop
Oh yeah, there is. With so many different laments—there’s personal lament, there’s corporate lament, repentance lament, justice-oriented lament—the psalmists knew all sorts of pain or difficulties. It’s really refreshing when you see in a lament psalm words or phrases that just kind of leap off the page that were there all the time but because of the suffering or hardship or difficulty, you read the Bible differently. It’s amazing to me how, even outside of lament, I’m reading the Pastoral Epistles differently. Paul’s dealing with tensions and problems within the church, and just in light of what the last two years have been like, I’m just seeing things through a new lens, realizing that most of the New Testament was written in conflict. Well, many of the psalms were written because people were really, really discouraged. Psalm 42: “Why so downcast, O my soul? Hope in God!” He says it over and over and over, and he’s actually trying to lead his soul to a place that it appears he’s not in. He’s pushing his soul along by repeating particular truths that he knows are true, but they must not feel very true because he’s having to repeat them over and over and over. That’s one of the ways that lament helps us. It not only identifies with our sorrow but it repeats particular themes and keeps pointing us to God because people who are in the middle of sorrow or deep moments of grief don’t need a bunch of new truths. They just need one or two truths repeated over and over and over as a means of encouragement and hope.

Matt Tully
I think one of the natural responses or reactions to hearing you talk about lament in this way is perhaps a sense that it can be dangerous for us. Lament, in some ways, gives us permission—perhaps in a way that we haven’t ever felt before—to embrace some of these “negative” emotions, whether that’s frustration, discouragement, or sadness. We can embrace them and speak them to God in a real sense. And yet, I wonder if people could be worried that that could get out of control and that they would lose control over those feelings and that they could take them to a bad place. Is that a concern that we should be aware of, or is that a misunderstanding?

Mark Vroegop
That’s a really good concern. I think it’s an appropriate caution because one of the elements of lament—we talk about turn, complain, ask, and trust. Turn: choosing to pray in the midst of my pain. Complain: laying out my struggles in stark and clear terms. Ask: claiming the promises of the Scriptures. Trust: ending in a renewal of trust and confidence in God. Three of those four most Christians wouldn’t struggle with, but complain—that’s the one that I’ve spent the most time talking to people about. To be very clear, you can complain and be sinful. There’s no doubt about it. You can come to God with a demanding, you owe me sort of spirit. You’re expressing all of your bitterness because God did you wrong. That’s not complaint; that’s just flat out sinful anger, and it needs to be repented of. But, for the Christian who talks to God honestly about their sorrow and their struggle for the purpose of turning their hearts to God in confident trust, that’s all over the psalms. I think it’s something that we need to embrace, and I think that the mistake that many Christians make is not talking to God too much about their complaints; it’s talking to God too little. I think there is a danger that somebody could complain way too much. I haven’t found that to be very true. I’ve found it more often than not that people have given God the silent treatment. They don’t think they can talk to Gold. They don’t know that things like, “Will the Lord spurn forever and never again be favorable? . . . Has the steadfast love forever ceased? . . . Are his promises at an end for all time? . . . Has God forgotten to be gracious? . . . Has he in anger shut up his compassion?” That’s Psalm 77:7–9. Most people don’t even know it’s in the Bible. When they hear it they’re like, Oh! That’s awesome! The psalmist knows that God hasn’t forgotten to be gracious, but a lot of Christians don’t know that a lot of the Christian life is spent reclaiming and reorienting our minds and hearts around truth that we know are foundationally correct but in the moment don’t feel true at the time. That’s what lament does. It helps us reckon with those two realities: I don’t feel like this is right, I don’t feel like this is true; but I know that it is. That’s, to me, what it means to endure through hardship and suffering is embracing those two realities.

Matt Tully
That’s such a helpful way to phrase it because I do think, going back to something you said earlier, that so often we can view that struggle itself as a sign of a lack of faith. That true faith would just embrace what we know is true, and then we wouldn’t have these other feelings that seem like they’re in conflict with that. But would you say that lament is something that is compatible with faith and that it’s not a lack of faith?

Mark Vroegop
Absolutely. In fact, I think it takes a lot of faith to lament. I think lament is one of the most theologically faith-filled things that a Christian could possibly do. In the middle of the darkest of dark moments, when your pain is so raw and so real, you have the faith to talk to God about your pain. If faith isn’t present, you would give God the silent treatment, you wouldn’t talk to him, you would just be angry, you would be resigned and say that God really doesn’t care. But in the middle of your darkest moment, you’re talking to God about what’s wrong with the world. You’re asking him to be true to his promises and recommitting that you’re going to trust in him. I don’t know what could be more faith-filled than that. In fact, I think that’s what Christianity was designed for. It was for the darkest of the dark moments of life—to know that even in this moment you’re [God] still going to be faithful. And that there’s coming a day when I will praise you. There is coming a day when I will be thankful, and lament is the means by which I am able to push my heart toward that destination of gratitude and thanksgiving.

26:35 - What Happens When We Neglect Lament?

Matt Tully
I think this is actually a great segue into how lament is connected to our witness as Christians—another thing that you talk about in the book. You write, “A broken world and an increasingly hostile culture make contemporary Christianity unbalanced and limited in the hope that we offer if we neglect this minor key song of lament. We need to recover the ancient practice of lament and the grace that comes through it. Christianity suffers when lament is missing.” What do you mean when you say that Christianity is “unbalanced and limited in the hope that we can offer people when we neglect lament”?

Mark Vroegop
Have you ever been to a funeral and you wanted to tell everybody, Hey, this is a funeral. Somebody died. We’re really sad? I’m not opposed to there being a celebration of life and reflecting on all of the good things that the person meant to the people who are in the room. But there are some times, in the context of how we grieve, if an outsider stepped in, they wouldn’t even know it was a funeral apart from the casket up front because it’s almost as though everyone in the room is afraid of the sorrow connected to the loss. In fact, sometimes it almost feels like we’re gathering together and the one thing none of us should do is be sad. And yet, death is a reminder that sin is in the world, and it would just seem to me that the one group of people who ought to be able to interpret that moment really well ought to be Christians. If it’s an issue where we’re not able to interpret the brokenness of the world, the death of a loved one, and know what song we sing, I think it negates the witness of the church for us to say, This is really sad. This is really dark. This is really hard. But we also have the answer in the person and work of Jesus. It’s not as though we stay in our sorrow; but in some cases, it almost feels as if our sorrow is so distant from those moments that we neglect the opportunity to platform the gospel. Yeah, this is dark; this is hard. And yet, God is good. I think that’s part of the central message of what the gospel can do when the bottom falls out of someone’s life.

Matt Tully
It seems like Christianity uniquely brings together, as a worldview, it brings together the horrible, stark, painful reality of sin and death, which we all humans experience and know to be true. And yet, it offers this hope that transcends those things. It does feel like even as Christians we have a hard time letting both of those things sit together.

Mark Vroegop
There’s a balance, and I’m arguing that we’re a little off balance in that. I think the way that we approach even Sunday gatherings—I think we do, generally in twenty-first century Western Christianity—we do celebration really well. We know how to be positive and encouraging. We do all of that super well. One thing I think we need to grow in is how do we speak to the dark moments of life. One of the things that I’m encouraged with, and I think it’s coming out of the last two years and this global mourning, is I’m seeing a renewed interest in the language of lament. I’m seeing more songs that are fitting with that genre, I’m seeing more sermons in these categories because I think we’ve woken up to the fact of, Hey, we’ve got to help each other because we’re all struggling, and we need a language to talk to God. So, I think that may be one of the graces of this really hard season.

30:29 - Lament in Corporate Worship

Matt Tully
What might that look like for churches to corporately lament some of these big events that affect many people and affect the whole world. We see them out there in the news headlines. How do we as churches—and how do we as pastors—lead their churches in a corporate kind of gathering?

Mark Vroegop
I think it could affect just a single Sunday service in a small way with a pastoral prayer that just reckons with some of the brokenness for a little bit longer than maybe the space that we would normally allow. I think it could relate to the tone of sermons in order to give people the space to realize that this kind of language is not only helpful but it’s in the Bible and it’s inspired. And to be reminded of where our people have been living all week. You can have a service of lament. We’ve had those before where the entire evening is designed to create a holistic service. You could have different movements that follow one of the lament psalms. Or just giving people an opportunity to lament privately through some space in a service for silence and reflection—just an opportunity to breathe and recalibrate their soul. Or it could relate to a renewed study of one of the lament psalms—just trying to see how do we get this into our daily operating system of how we live and to have lament be more normative and less crisis-oriented. So, from teaching to what we sing to our order of worship to entire services, I think there is lots of space to be able to think about how we use this language to help people know how to follow Jesus faithfully when they’re really hurting.

32:27 - A Prayer of Lament

Matt Tully
Maybe as a final question to close us out, I wonder if you could lead us all together here, right now, in a short prayer of lament. As you look out at the world that we’re facing right now, the pain that we see on display all over the place, how would you model a prayer of lament?

Mark Vroegop
Yes, I would be happy to. Let’s pray:
How long, O Lord, will our hearts be broken? How long, O Lord, will we live in very conflicting tension? How long, O Lord, will it feel as though you have not listened to our prayers, because we can’t make the connection between what we’ve prayed and what we see? Lord, our hearts are broken, even in this moment, for the losses that we’ve experienced, whether it’s people that have passed away, whether it’s conflict that has been so much a part of the last two years, whether it’s global conflicts related to wars and rumors of wars, whether it’s division at family levels and church levels and a national level. There is so much brokenness around us. But Lord, what we do know is that you’re in charge. You are God who rules over the entire universe. Sin and the devil and death have an expiration date. We know that one day you are going to make all things right. So Lord, we trust in your purposes. We trust in your goodness. We trust in your grace. We believe that you are sovereign. We believe that you are good. We’re grateful that when we can’t make sense of how all things are working out, we know that we can trust the God in heaven who is in charge. We rest in that today. And while we say, How long? we also say to you, O Lord, how good you are. We pray this in Jesus’s name. Amen.

Matt Tully
Amen. Thank you so much, Mark.

Mark Vroegop
You’re welcome, Matt. Thank you.

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