4 When I heard these things, I sat down and wept. For some days I mourned and fasted and prayed before the God of heaven. (Nehemiah 1:4)

(Note: If you’re just joining us, for this week’s Connect Devotional I’m recapping the daily exercises that I ended the message with this past Sunday. If you missed the message, you can watch and/or listen to it here.)

Nehemiah asked the question about how the people and city are faring back in Jerusalem hundreds of miles away—and the news is not good. Jerusalem’s wall is still burned down (150 years later!) and the people are both vulnerable to attack as well as in perpetual shame.

There are a couple of extremes when it comes to how we respond to bad news: stalled-out wallowing (overwhelmed, cycling through in our own heads) or impulsive action (who’s got time to feel when there’s so much work to do?).

The Scriptures offer a third, better option: lament. We define biblical lament as grieving over broken things before God as preparation for action with God.

Lament encourages us to feel the brokenness—God is grieved by the broken things of this world and we should be too—but it’s not just a sadness that keeps us inside our own heads. Lament orients us around the God who is larger than the broken things and allows God to organize and order our heart around his own.

Today the invitation is to bring the broken things you’re seeing before God in a heart-posture of lament. This is a new practice for most of us. 

For those of us for whom this is new, there are a whole set of Psalms dedicated to lament that can help us. Today I’m going to invite you to pray through Psalm 44 and use that to help you to find words of lament.

Read through Psalm 44 three times, slowly and out loud. Listen for a word or a phrase that God might use to kick-start your lament work.  Remember, this isn’t just about feeling bad or sad, it’s also about organizing your heart and mind around God as preparation for action with God. For those of us who’d rather act than feel, this is an important part of the process that we shouldn’t skip over.

Do the Psalm 44 exercise by clicking on the link above. What is it that God’s inviting you to lament over with him?