When suffering hits right after your life finally came together, you can keep walking with God by doing something the Bible already gives words for: telling him the truth about the timing, out loud and more than once, while letting a few people stay close without asking them to explain it. That is lament. This guide turns it into a week-long practice you can do alone or with a small group. It will not tell you why this happened. It gives you a way to stay present with God and with others while the question stays open.
The practice draws on a Jude 3 Project conversation between Lisa Fields and Wesley Thompson, a pastor whose life collapsed at the very moment it seemed to be arriving. Use one sitting to read through the guide. Then spend seven days on the practice, ten to twenty minutes a day. If you are in a group, meet once before the week and once after it.
One rule before anything else: nobody fixes anybody
The book of Job records something Job’s friends did well before they did it badly. “So they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him: for they saw that his grief was very great” (Job 2:13). Later the friends start explaining Job’s suffering, and by the end of the book God says they did not speak rightly of him (Job 42:7). Their first week was their best week.
Paul gives the same instruction in one line: “Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep” (Romans 12:15). Weeping with someone is different from correcting their weeping.
So if you are doing this with others, agree to the rule out loud before anyone shares. In practice it means:
- No reasons offered for someone else’s loss, including the ones that sound faithful.
- No verse handed to someone as an answer unless they ask for one.
- No predictions about how it will turn out, hopeful or otherwise.
- No stories about someone who had it worse, or someone who got their miracle.
What you can say is short. Thank you for telling us. That sounds brutal. Do you want anything from us right now, or just company? Silence counts as a response too. A facilitator’s main job is to protect this rule gently, including from themselves. Sharing is always optional. Anyone can pass on any question without explaining why.
If you are doing this alone, the rule still applies to you. You do not have to hurry yourself toward a lesson.
First, look at the order of events
Wesley Thompson’s season of loss began with a season of arrival. He was serving as a youth pastor in Atlanta and had just been hired to teach religion classes at a local university. His wife, who held a master’s degree in social work, had just started work in grief counseling, the field she had hoped for. Then they learned she was pregnant. He described it this way: “life was finally there for us.” And then: “things are on the come up, things are looking promising, and all of a sudden my wife becomes very ill.”
Look at that sentence closely. The pain is real on its own, but the cruelty is in the sequence. A blow that lands after years of struggle feels like more of the same. A blow that lands right after the good thing arrives feels aimed. Lisa Fields put the confusion into words when she asked him how this could happen to two young people who were seeking God and trying to do the right things. Most people in this situation are carrying two losses at once: the loss itself, and the loss of an unspoken belief that faithfulness buys a stretch of peace.
Thompson’s first prayer in the hospital was about exactly that collision. Standing at the foot of his wife’s bed after family and friends had gone home, he asked, “God, how come I’m looking at my 28-year-old pregnant wife on a ventilator in the ICU?” It is not a theological question. It is a description of the scene, spoken to God, with the word how come in front of it.
Try this now. On a sheet of paper, draw a line down the middle. On the left, list what had finally come together, as specifically as you can. On the right, list what happened, in the order it happened. Do not write any explanations. When you are done, look at where the two columns meet. That meeting point is what this week is about.
Psalm 13 has a shape, not just a feeling
Psalm 13 is poetry, a prayer written to be prayed. Read the whole psalm aloud, slowly. Then read it again and notice how it moves.
Verses 1-2 are complaint. “How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” (Psalm 13:1). The psalmist asks how long four times in two verses. Verses 3-4 are request: the speaker asks God to look, to answer, to give light. Verses 5-6 turn to trust: “But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation” (Psalm 13:5).
Three observations will matter for your week.
First, the complaint is not a warm-up to get past. It takes up a third of the prayer and it is addressed to God directly. Second, the turn in verse 5 begins with but and looks backward: “I have trusted.” The speaker reaches for what has already been true about God, not for a feeling that has suddenly returned. Third, the psalm does not tell you how much time passed between verse 2 and verse 5. It could have been a breath. It could have been a year. A prayer can hold the turn before a life does.
Thompson made the case for why the complaint belongs. He grew up hearing, directly or indirectly, that you do not question God. He came to the opposite conclusion, reasoning from every other relationship we have: “you don’t display emotion to someone you don’t care about.” Lisa Fields made the point from God’s side: “God can handle our anger. He knows what’s in our heart already.” She added that honest prayer about frustration and pain is “when we have our most authentic prayers,” and that the relationship grows there.
Here is the test that keeps lament honest. Anger at God is still lament as long as it is spoken to him. Psalm 13 never stops addressing God, and neither did Jesus when he prayed Psalm 22 from the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). The danger is not strong feeling. The danger is when the anger stops being said to God and starts being carried away from him. The practice below is designed to keep it pointed in the right direction.
The week: seven short practices
Do one each day. If a day is too heavy, do less, or repeat the previous day. Skipping is allowed. The point is staying in the conversation, not completing a program.
Day 1: Pray the timeline
Take the two columns you wrote. Read them aloud to God as a prayer, starting with the words God, here is what happened. Do not add an interpretation. Thompson’s first prayer was a description, and yours can be too.
Day 2: Write your own “how long”
Reread Psalm 13:1-2. Then write four lines of your own, each beginning with How long. Make them concrete: how long the waiting room, the empty side of the bed, the job search, the silence. Pray them aloud.
Day 3: When the promise does not make it easier
Read John 11:1-6. Jesus hears that Lazarus is sick and says, “This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God” (John 11:4). Then “he abode two days still in the same place where he was” (John 11:6), and Lazarus dies. Now read John 11:17-21, where Martha meets Jesus with the sentence many grieving people know by heart: “Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died” (John 11:21).
Thompson felt that John 11:4 came to him as a word about his wife, and he is honest that it did not shorten anything: “even when you hear that at the time, it doesn’t make things easier for you.” He went further: “what makes that suffering even worse at times is when you do get a feel like you have a response from God.” If you hold a promise and are still waiting, write Martha’s sentence in your own words and pray it. Then read John 11:35, “Jesus wept.” This passage does not promise your story will end like Lazarus’s. It shows that Jesus grieved at the grave even though he knew what came next.
Day 4: The prayer you have been editing
Write the prayer you have been cleaning up before you say it. The accusation, the disappointment, the question you are afraid is disrespectful. Then pray it as written. Notice that Lisa Fields said God already knows what is in your heart. You are not informing him. You are refusing to hide from him.
Day 5: Tell one person, if you can
Lisa Fields described a second kind of honesty, being able to tell other people, in her words, “Hey, I’m mad at God about this,” and she said, “I think that’s where the freedom comes.” Choose one person who will keep the no-fixing rule. Tell them one true sentence about how you are doing with God. If no one feels safe yet, write down what would make someone safe. That is useful information too.
Day 6: Let one person help
Thompson admitted, “I shut people out at first.” As a chaplain in training he had sat with patients who had no one, alone “not by choice, but by force.” His counsel to anyone suffering was plain: “if you don’t have to be by yourself, please don’t be by yourself.” Today, accept one offer you would normally decline. A meal, a ride, a phone call, someone sitting with you. If no offer has come, ask for one small, specific thing.
Day 7: Find your “but,” or borrow one
Reread Psalm 13:5-6. Try writing one line that begins with But and names something already true about God, the way the psalmist reaches back to “I have trusted.” If you cannot honestly write that line, pray Mark 9:24 instead, where a father with a suffering child “cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.” Thompson said of his own four months, “I struggled. My faith got weak.” He still insisted, “You can have a weak faith and still say, God, I know you got this.” A borrowed prayer prayed with weak faith is still a prayer.
For the person sitting beside someone in this
If you are the friend, spouse or group member rather than the one in crisis, your week has a different task. Keep the rule. Show up at a regular time. Offer one specific kind of help instead of asking what they need. Expect the person to say angry things about God and resist the urge to defend him; Lisa Fields’ point that God can handle it applies to your nerves too. Thompson remembered that some church leaders present a faith nothing can touch, and that people who have not been through something cannot say what they would do. Your presence will help more than your certainty.
Know where pastoral care stops. Seeking a counselor or therapist during grief or prolonged numbness is not a failure of faith; God works through trained people. If you or the person you are with has thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 in the US to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and stay with them while they do.
Questions for the group meeting after the week
- Looking at your two columns, what did the timing take from you that the loss alone would not have?
- Which day of the practice was hardest to do, and what made it hard?
- Psalm 13 gives complaint and trust in one prayer. Did your prayers this week move at all between them, stay in one place, or go back and forth?
- Thompson still cannot say whether his suffering was something God did or something God allowed. Does that question matter to you right now, or is it one you are willing to leave open for a while?
- Was there a moment this week when someone tried to fix you, or when you tried to fix someone? What happened next?
- What would it look like to keep one part of this practice going after the week ends?
Before you close, go back to the sheet you wrote on the first day. Read the left column again, the part that had finally come together. Ask yourself one question and leave it unanswered if you need to: Did I believe I was owed what is on this side? You do not have to settle that today. You only have to keep bringing it to God.