Pour Out Your Heart

Lamentations does not flinch and does not tidy up. The poet is watching his city burn, the temple in ruins, children fainting in the streets, and he refuses to look away or reach for a silver lining. My eyes are spent with weeping, he says. My stomach churns. This is grief with the volume all the way up, written down and preserved, on purpose, as part of Scripture. That alone is worth noticing. We tend to think the holy response to disaster is composure, or quick gratitude, or a verse about how it will all work out. Lamentations says something else. It says cry aloud. Let tears stream down like a torrent, day and night. And then the line that turns wailing into prayer: pour out your heart like water before the presence of the Lord. Not pour it out to a journal. Not bury it. Not perform okayness for the people around you. Pour it out before God, all of it, the rage and the bewilderment and the ache, like water tipped from a jar until nothing is left inside. This is permission a lot of us never gave ourselves. You are allowed to bring God your grief raw and unresolved, with no bow on it. A faith that can only manage thank you is not yet the whole faith. The same Scripture that teaches us to praise teaches us, in this book, exactly how to weep, and insists we do it in his presence.