Daily Devotional: Suffering & Lament: It Is Okay to Not Be Okay

This is an opinion column.

THROUGH THE VALLEY

“How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart?”
Psalm 13:1-2

REFLECTION

There is a pressure in many church communities, spoken or unspoken, that says a person of faith should always be okay. That trust in God means maintaining a certain composure. That if you are really walking closely with the Lord, the hard things should not hit you quite so hard. That grief, if it lingers too long, becomes a sign of insufficient faith. Most of us have felt that pressure at one time or another. And most of us have performed okay when we were anything but.

• We smiled when we were breaking.
• We said fine when someone asked how we were doing.
• We sat in the service and sang the words while inside we were asking God why He seemed so far away.
• We carried the weight alone because we did not want anyone to question our faith.

I have to be honest. There are times when I have related to every one of those. And then we read Psalm 13 and something in us exhales. Because here is David, the man after God’s own heart, the giant slayer, the songwriter of Israel, writing words that sound less like faith and more like desperation. How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? These are not the polished words of someone who has it all together. These are the raw, unfiltered words of someone in real pain, spoken directly to God without apology.

And God put them in the Bible. He preserved them. He made sure they would be read by every generation of His people. Which means He is not offended by honest pain. He is not disappointed when we come to Him in pieces. The Psalms are full of lament, full of questions, full of the kind of anguish that does not resolve neatly by the end of the page. And they are there because God knows that is what real faith sometimes looks like. Not polished. Not composed. Honest.

This week we make space for the part of the Christian life that does not get enough room in most Sunday morning conversations. We lament. We grieve. We bring the hard, unresolved, painful things to God without dressing them up first. Not because we have lost faith, but because faith is strong enough to hold our honest pain. You do not have to be okay to come to God. You just have to come.

What are you carrying right now that you have been pretending is okay when it is not, and what would it look like to bring that specific pain to God today exactly as it is, without cleaning it up first?

PRAYER

Lord, we stop performing today. We put down the okay we have been carrying around as a shield, and we come to You as we actually are. Some of us are hurting in ways we have not told anyone. Some of us are asking how long in the quiet of our own hearts. We bring it all to You now, unfiltered and unpolished, trusting that You are big enough to hold it. You put the Psalms of lament in Your Word for a reason. You are not surprised by our pain. Receive it. Sit with us in it. And remind us that coming to You honestly is itself an act of faith. Amen.