Learning to Lament

God I need you, this sickness is gripping my life and sometimes controlling me. I have my good days which you have given me and for that I am forever grateful! I know your love and grace can rise above all of this as it has done so many times before.

Dear God, I suffer with depression, with anxiety and sometimes my bipolar-ness feels like to much for me. I am in a dark place, a place so deep that I feel as if the light will never reach me. People around me can see this change in me, and they don't like it anymore than me. I have abandoned you Lord, I have turned away from you because I feel like you are not there, like not even you could help me now.

Still God, I know you are there, you are holding me, walking beside me, being my light in the darkness. I can see your hand in and through my life, my family and friends.

God please take away this darkness, this evil thing that surrounds me, hold my heart God, you are the maker of the moon and stars and you know my heart, my mind and you've seen it breaking and cracking and you are holding it in your hands.

I know you hear me, you have lightened my darkness you have pulled my life out of that dark, horrible place. You protected me even when I turned from you. I will tell everybody about how in my darkest night you came to me in my little apartment on Douglas Avenue and showed me you are still there, you have been there all along, you shone your light behind my bedroom door and I praise you for bringing me back, to you, to the world, my friends and family.

God I praise you for your light in my life!


This is something I wrote in our Adult Discipleship/Sunday school class this past April after Jake and I started going back to church. We were "challenged" to write a Psalm of Lament and this is what came out. I have to say it was a very cleansing and purifying thing for me to write my grief, my darkness down in this way. I have always loved poetry and writing, but this was something new, something I grabbed onto and something I now cling to; it helps me get through a lot of dark moments.

I encourage you to write your own Psalm of Lament, if you have any questions about how I went about this let me know. I have a "checklist" of the structure a lament should take, but regardless, just know that no matter how you write it God will hear you and be in that moment with you. He is never so far that we cannot reach him, that he cannot hold us. He is there in every moment and goes before us. What a comfort.