Sometimes there are seasons when the need to express lament for personal or group pain seems even more acute. In recent weeks, our mission agency endured the worst accident in its history, with eleven key leaders killed in Tanzania. One of them we had known quite closely for about thirty years. Others were known to us in various ways.

Ongoing global conflicts, especially in Ukraine and Gaza, continue to bring daily accounts of more killed and wounded. Yesterday, seven foreign aid workers in Gaza were traveling in a vehicle when an Israeli drone mistakenly fired a missile that killed them all. One was a vibrant woman whose mother was from the Indian state of Mizoram. I continue to believe we need an immediate cease fire in Gaza, where the hostages held by Hamas can be released and violence ended with negotiations.

But while working for solutions to seemingly intractable global problems, it is important that we all learn to express the pain that so often fills our hearts as we face loss, transition, and death in our families and world. Trying to deny that pain, bottling it up inside, keeping on going in an endless cycle of ‘doing’, risks causing long term effects in our bodies and relationships. As one author said about grief and trauma, often ‘the body keeps the score’.

Lament happens in every culture, at every point in history. It is done in many different ways, through mediums of art, song, writing of many kinds, poetry, dance, and more. Lament provides an outlet for our emotions, and expresses solidarity with those around us in suffering. The Bible is a book of lament, with various forms of expression especially including the Hebrew prophets of the Old Testament. Jesus in the New Testament expresses this tradition of prophetic lament, also continuing the Biblical element of future hope that almost always accompanies these cries of pain and suffering.

A few months ago I was with a friend and colleague, Steve Inman, who for several years has engaged in a journey of writing poems of lament. These poems have at times been wrenched out of his soul. Raised in a Christian family, Steve experienced brokenness and pain in his own story and the story of others. After some years of being away from the Christian faith and writing lament from that perspective, Steve in recent years has returned to a place of hope in Christ in the midst of still articulating lament. As I read one of his published books of poetry, Barb-wire Kisses, I was struck by the power of his poems. I asked him for permission to quote in this blog post one of his poems of lament, Small Broken Pieces. Steve is presently working to publish another book of poetry, particularly focused in the tradition of Biblical Lament. Here is this poem:

Small Broken Pieces

Small Broken Pieces. That was and has been my soul

since even before you found me.

Shattered. I fall into your grace.

Shards piercing your

hands, feet and side.

Your blood will glue the pieces together

Slowly you are setting me free.

Turning me like you.

Slowly the pieces are coming together

as your Spirit guides them and

correctly assembles them.

This lament poem by Steve fits the genre of Biblical lament, with the pain of honest awareness combined with a hope of future restoration and the pieces coming together. Thanks, Steve.

However we express ourselves in times of pain, it is important to find an honest expression of your personal and collective lament. Sometimes that will seem very dark and gloom-filled. But it can also lead us back (really onward) to a future hope in Christ, as it did Steve and so many others through history.