You're Not Meant to Live in Sorrow
Someone asked me…
“How do I move forward in the healing while I’m still grieving?”
Grief can become a companion. One we learn the rhythm of. It filled the void where the relationship used to be. And as much as we may be ready to unearth it and move forward - we get stuck in the comfort of it. And in some strange way, we don’t want it to leave. Grief is the reminder that something is still missing.
Grief and healing aren’t opposites. They’re unfortunate companions. You don’t get to leave grief behind.
Healing isn’t a finish line we ever quite reach. Maybe what we need is a reframe - if we redefine healing to include grief, instead of waiting for the moment we feel like we’ve arrived, there’s less pressure. And the question changes.
It stops being “How do I heal while grieving?” and becomes “How do I stop letting grief be the loudest voice in the room?”
I think the best way to make grief stop being the main thing is to honor it, with the Lord.
I’ve been a Christian basically my whole life. And yet I was unfamiliar with what it actually means to lament. I’d cautiously say most Christians are too. Not because the Bible is silent on it. But because somewhere along the way, our church culture taught us to skip past it.
To honor the grief means to honor the overwhelming emotions that come with it - the anger, the sadness, the doubt, the unanswered questions. We’ve been taught to rush past all of it. Because it feels like being mad or sad discounts our faith. As if we don’t really believe God has a plan. Like our being upset somehow equals doubt in Him.
At some point pretending everything is fine became the “right” way to process deep pain? If I’m being honest, that doesn’t sound very Christ-like. It sounds like we’re more worried about what other people think about our faith than what we’re actually bringing to God.
He isn’t only a good God in the blessings. He is a good God in the sorrow. But if we never lament - if we push through without honoring the grief with Him - we miss the chance to learn that.
We need to lament.
But what is lament?
Lament is honest, unedited grief brought directly to God. It’s the prayer you’d be embarrassed to say out loud at church. It’s telling Him you’re angry. Asking Him why. Saying you don’t understand. Saying it hurts and you want it to stop. It’s the raw version. The real version. The one you’ve been hiding.
Lament is not weakness. It’s not a lack of faith. It’s the Bible’s own language for sorrow.
And it’s all over scripture. About a third of the Psalms are laments.
David crying out, “How long, O Lord? Will You forget me forever?” Jesus sweating drops of blood in Gethsemane, asking the Father to let the cup pass. Jesus on the cross, quoting Psalm 22: “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”
If lament was good enough for Him in His worst moment, it’s good enough for us in ours.
But how do you Lament?
Address Him honestly. Not the polished version.
Bring the complaint. Name the pain out loud. Tell Him what hurts, what isn’t fair, what you don’t understand. Don’t soften it.
Ask boldly. For relief. For change. For His presence in the room.
Choose to trust - even without resolution. Not because the pain is gone. Not because you got the answer you wanted. Just because He is who He says He is.
That’s a lament. Honesty. Complaint. Asking. Trust.
Think about how trust grows with a new friend. You don’t lay out all your family issues over the first coffee. You take your time. You share a little. You watch how it lands. You come back. You still carry the baggage out with you when you leave - that’s normal. That’s how trust gets built.
Lament is like that. Every day you bring some of it to Him. Most days you carry it back out with you. But little by little, you start to take a little weight out of the bag and leave it there. Until one day you realize the bag is lighter - not because anything fixed it, but because you’ve quietly been handing pieces over for a long time.
And here’s what took me the longest to understand. The trust lament builds isn’t with the God of blessings - it’s with the God of your sorrows.
A God who is good in the blessings is easy to love and trust. Anyone can love that God. But a God who is good in the sorrow - that’s a different kind of love. That’s a love and trust you can only learn from inside the grief. You don’t get to know Him that way from the easy side of life.
God can handle your anger. He can handle your questions. He can tolerate your impatience. He can hold your pain. He can carry your sorrow.
And when we bring all of it to Him - all the messy emotions bundled up inside the grief - it gets easier to leave the grief with Him.
One day you’ll realize you’ve stopped picking it back up. Not because the grief is gone - but because trust has gotten bigger than the heaviness.
That’s the shift.
When we lament, we start to actually believe those verses... That He is our refuge. That He is our strength. Because we have built trust with Him. We stop quoting them and start standing on them.
That’s the whole point of lament. Not just to release the pain. To build a trust deep enough to fill the void the relationship left behind. The same void grief has been filling.
Lament makes room for something else to live there. Praise.
We can finally say with our whole chest what every worship song repeats, what the Bible tells us - He is good, all the time. Because we’ve built the trust and the confidence that He is who He says He is.
Lament leads to trust. Trust leads to confidence. Confidence leads to knowing - He has more for me. I am not meant to live in sorrow. That’s how you move through grief
Slowly, over time, you’ll realize grief is no longer the loudest voice in the room. It isn’t drowning out happiness and joy anymore. It’s a low hum - still there, but right alongside the joy.
Slowly, you start to believe what the Bible says - joy comes in the morning.
All of this gives us new direction. New purpose. New worth. New identity. I am not just a mother whose child cut her off… I am His beloved.
And maybe healing was never what I was looking for. Maybe He was.