Suffering is real, but God has given us a gift to help express our emotions and process the suffering we face in life. In this opening session, you will gain an understanding of what lament is and how God has built this type of prayer into the Scriptures. When you engage in lament, you can experience God walking with you through the deepest valleys and be brought to a place of healing, rest, and hope for the future.
Lament can help you process your own emotions or equip you to help other people process their suffering and pain. In this session, we will discover the first two steps in how to lament and then begin the journey of beginning to pray in this way. You will be surprised and maybe even uncomfortable at how God invites you to express yourself to him in these steps.
To truly lament, we must bridge out of our complaints and move towards asking God to act. Mark Vroegop writes, “Part of the grace of lament is the way it invites us to pray boldly even when we are bruised badly.” You will find this session to be a critical step in your journey of processing your suffering.
Lament begins with raw honesty of our painful circumstances and concludes by taking our eyes off our circumstances and placing them in a place where we find hope. This final step gives you the perspective you need to continue to move forward in a healthy way no matter what suffering you have encountered.