Let's jump right in.
You bring your pain, hurt, confusion, complaint, complacency, compliancy--your confession or your plea to God. God is always ready for you to be raw, honest and messy. We need agreement with self to enter this process and "go there" with our buried feelings.
It starts with creating space and time to get in touch with the deep pain or acknowledgment of wrong, whether done to us or by us. How do you access the deep emotion? There are feelings and realities and residue that have been stuffed in the name of getting on with daily life. So they need stirred up. Can be done by sitting in stillness and simply meditating on it until things surface. Or journaling it out. Or perhaps you access your emotions best through art or music*. We need to get past our head down to our heart.
Once you have connected with the emotion, speak it out to God, honestly, in raw form. Acknowledgment of truth is important. Tell the Lord what happened, how you feel, cry, yell, tell him what you need him to do. Lament is actually a powerful act of faith--you are coming to God because you believe God's there, will hear you, and can respond (even if we don't have any idea what that will look like).
You make your request. You might recommit to putting your trust in God. The Psalms of lament often end in expressions of praise. Somehow going through our night of weeping prepares us for joy in the morning. Maybe there was some sort of exchange in the night of mourning. Or maybe all we needed was to access our true feelings, acknowledge the deep grief, know that we are not alone, and God is big enough... for all of it.
JOURNAL ENTRY: Is there something I need to grieve? Sit quietly and ask Holy Spirit to bring it to mind.
SIDE NOTE: I am still learning about lament. Would love to hear your thoughts.
*I access and express my heart best through music; wrote a song of lament this week as part of a Generational Trauma Healing class [listen].
