“God’s anger is only a moment,
His favour, however, lasts a lifetime,
weeping lasts all night long,
but there is shouting for joy in the morning.”
— Psalm 30:5
In my article “Christian faith answers suffering best when it has no answer” I give a stark analysis of the darkness of grief and the relevance of lament. It would be easy to imagine that all of grief is lament, and there is no hope, but that would not be true.
I know there are many who can attest to the truth that there is life on the other side of lament, and indeed deeper joys than we’ve ever experienced. The longer we bear and endure the deepest griefs, the more certain we also grow the capacity to relish the deepest most grateful joys.
Above I have set out Psalm 30:5. It’s my interpretation from a cursory look at the Hebrew and the English translations.
Notice the connection between the temporal nature of God’s anger—that brings conviction to our heart to confess sin—and the salvation peace in the favour that rests on us eternally, with the temporal nature of a solitary night, yet the permanence of morning flushed with joy.
And yet as we juxtapose these extremes of time, the temporary with the eternal, we also get a glimpse of the length of one night, in context of the dark night of the soul.
The dark night of the soul is not just one night, it’s a series of nights, and sometimes it’s years of nights. Nights that are darker than pitch, where hope is vanquished, and yet by faith, those who trust learn the presence of God in God’s apparent absence.
The dark night of the soul is the exact image of the cast of lament. It is a state of being where we have nothing, we hope for nothing, and we simply sit in the nothingness.
It can seem over and over and over again that there will be no morning, even though we hope for it to emerge. Indeed these extremes being poles apart—a seeming eternity of dashed hope with the faith of a thread that cannot let go—are building for us joys we cannot comprehend.
As much as the dark night of the soul seems incomprehensible, unfathomable is the joy set before us for the suffering we have endured.
How can either of these concepts be adequately explained? They cannot be. They are in the realm of the Lord God, and just as God’s ways are higher than our ways, and his thoughts are higher than ours, we can grasp neither, yet we live them both.
The greatest hope a person can know when they’re in the deepest pit of anguish is the faith that tells them to “hold on, for it will be worth it.” It is the faith that will carry them to joys unspeakable. The definition of faith in the darkest night is to keep stepping despite hideous realities in the sure knowledge that restoration does indeed come.
On the other side of lament are the beautiful and meandering vistas of a spiritual peace beyond words. Imagine possessing a joy that requires nothing outside of oneself and you begin to understand what it is like to experience true joy.
Such a joy when it is possessed can never be taken away from a person. It is an eternal possession, just like that morning sun looks like it will go on forever. Yet even though it cannot be taken away, humility teaches us that we must nurture it to retain it, for in that is maturation That glorious morning sun that shines hope on our hearts, gives way to evening, and in our human condition we return at times to doubting and loss.
But once we’ve been to the dark night of the soul, once we have been crushed and have lived in brokenness, the opposite has also been given to us. What we may not possess every single moment is no less a possession.
One of the great possessions of the Christian faith is the dipole between lament and joy, even as much as one informs and teaches the other.
The stillness of lament is faith that prepares a person to experience depths of gratitude symptomatic of joy. Indeed, such a confidence is learned in the pit of despair if only we carry a blade of hope with us by faith.
