Dealing with our lament
I’ve been processing this idea for a while but felt like it was finally time to put something down in writing.
I’m currently meeting with several young couples for pre-marital counseling while at the same time several marriages in my social orbit (of ten years or more) are imploding.
It’s a heavy juxtaposition.
No one gets married imagining their marriage might one day implode. “That happens to other people,” they tell themselves. And yet, roughly 50% of marriages end in divorce, with Christians divorcing at roughly the same rate as non-Christians.
Why?
There can’t be just one answer to that question, of course. Maybe there are as many answers as there are relationships. The one answer I’ve always offered to young couples is character.
Think of character as a skill, one that like all skills can improve over time. You get married with a certain character skill level, one that has carried you thus far in life. But marriage will always require a much higher level of character. And that’s actually one of marriage’s primary functions—to help you grow up.
But that means you will experience some dissonance in marriage. Like a J curve, things will get worse before they get better. If someone with a freshman set of skills gets thrust into a varsity game, he’s going to struggle until his skill improves enough he can finally keep up with the pace of play.
In other words, when most people get married they don’t yet have the requisite character skill for marriage. They have to grow into it over time and there’s no way for that to happen except painfully. Some people misinterpret the pain of character progress as something wrong with their relationship and instead of leaning into growth they call it quits.
But marriage is not primarily for your happiness. It’s primarily for your holiness. Let it make you holy and it will make you happy. Don’t let it make you holy and it won’t make you either.
Another issue that has presented itself to me in recent years, however, though connected to the issue of character, is the issue of lament.
It seems to me that all people, myself included, carry lament; lament over a life that is not everything we thought or dreamed it would be. Our spouse is not everything we want him or her to be. Our marriage is not everything we want it to be. Our job is not everything we want it to be. Our Saturday afternoons are not everything we want them to be.
I’m not saying that all people consciously lament. In fact, I suspect that’s a big part of the problem. I’d bet most people don’t realize lament is what they’re feeling. They’re unhappy, frustrated, discontent, or scared (or all of the above) but unaware that underlying those feelings is sadness.
Like a parent who has lost a child might spend the rest of her life lamenting what her child never got to become, sometimes expressing that sadness as anger, I suspect lots of people carry around sadness regarding a life that never was, only that sadness expresses itself as anger or fear, sometimes resulting in people doing desperate, self-destructive (and relationship destroying) things.
If I am putting my finger on something true, not being a psychologist I’m not sure what the clinical solution is. I don’t think it can be something cliché like, “Be content with what you have.” That seems to me more looking off the problem than acknowledging it.
As painful as it might be, I think we have to face the lament. We have to be honest that life is not what we wish it to be. We wish our spouse were different or better in certain ways. We wish our marriage were different or better in certain ways. We wish our jobs were different or better in certain ways. We wish our Saturday afternoons were different or better in certain ways.
As Kari and I often tell our kids, it’s ok to be disappointed.
But we also need to acknowledge that the life we have, disappointing as it may be in some ways, is an incredible gift. In fact, that any of us has enough material space and time to lament certain aspects of our lives, imagining that they might be otherwise, is a remarkable privilege. The average medieval peasant didn’t have the time or luxury to lament her station in life. Even if she had, she had no means to change it. Her life was what it was.
She had no choice but to, nobly, live it.
People in contemporary western culture need to be honest about the lament they carry. We need spaces and places where we can face our lament together, talk about it, and realize that we are not alone.
But then we need to get to a place where we surrender that lament to God. We continue to acknowledge our lament, but in the same breath we receive and accept the life we have as an incredible gift, and we focus on living that life in love, trusting that loving well is the path to true flourishing and happiness, even if our circumstances aren’t everything we hoped they would be.
So, this is a dynamic, ongoing tension. We don’t pretend everything is fine. We have to be honest about our sadness, with ourselves, with God, and with the most important people in our lives. But neither do we make the mistake of thinking that we would finally be happy if we just changed the circumstances we are currently lamenting about. Shuffling the deck won’t solve the problem.
You will always have lament. Being human is to carry lament, if over nothing else, over who you have yet to become.
The key, it seems to me, is carrying that lament in a healthy way. If we can be honest about it and share it with one another, perhaps we can become the kinds of people who together embrace our imperfect lives as the gifts they are, honoring our promises, loving each other well, and living with the sure and confident hope that one day there will be no more lament to carry.
I’m currently meeting with several young couples for pre-marital counseling while at the same time several marriages in my social orbit (of ten years or more) are imploding.
It’s a heavy juxtaposition.
No one gets married imagining their marriage might one day implode. “That happens to other people,” they tell themselves. And yet, roughly 50% of marriages end in divorce, with Christians divorcing at roughly the same rate as non-Christians.
Why?
There can’t be just one answer to that question, of course. Maybe there are as many answers as there are relationships. The one answer I’ve always offered to young couples is character.
Think of character as a skill, one that like all skills can improve over time. You get married with a certain character skill level, one that has carried you thus far in life. But marriage will always require a much higher level of character. And that’s actually one of marriage’s primary functions—to help you grow up.
But that means you will experience some dissonance in marriage. Like a J curve, things will get worse before they get better. If someone with a freshman set of skills gets thrust into a varsity game, he’s going to struggle until his skill improves enough he can finally keep up with the pace of play.
In other words, when most people get married they don’t yet have the requisite character skill for marriage. They have to grow into it over time and there’s no way for that to happen except painfully. Some people misinterpret the pain of character progress as something wrong with their relationship and instead of leaning into growth they call it quits.
But marriage is not primarily for your happiness. It’s primarily for your holiness. Let it make you holy and it will make you happy. Don’t let it make you holy and it won’t make you either.
Another issue that has presented itself to me in recent years, however, though connected to the issue of character, is the issue of lament.
It seems to me that all people, myself included, carry lament; lament over a life that is not everything we thought or dreamed it would be. Our spouse is not everything we want him or her to be. Our marriage is not everything we want it to be. Our job is not everything we want it to be. Our Saturday afternoons are not everything we want them to be.
I’m not saying that all people consciously lament. In fact, I suspect that’s a big part of the problem. I’d bet most people don’t realize lament is what they’re feeling. They’re unhappy, frustrated, discontent, or scared (or all of the above) but unaware that underlying those feelings is sadness.
Like a parent who has lost a child might spend the rest of her life lamenting what her child never got to become, sometimes expressing that sadness as anger, I suspect lots of people carry around sadness regarding a life that never was, only that sadness expresses itself as anger or fear, sometimes resulting in people doing desperate, self-destructive (and relationship destroying) things.
If I am putting my finger on something true, not being a psychologist I’m not sure what the clinical solution is. I don’t think it can be something cliché like, “Be content with what you have.” That seems to me more looking off the problem than acknowledging it.
As painful as it might be, I think we have to face the lament. We have to be honest that life is not what we wish it to be. We wish our spouse were different or better in certain ways. We wish our marriage were different or better in certain ways. We wish our jobs were different or better in certain ways. We wish our Saturday afternoons were different or better in certain ways.
As Kari and I often tell our kids, it’s ok to be disappointed.
But we also need to acknowledge that the life we have, disappointing as it may be in some ways, is an incredible gift. In fact, that any of us has enough material space and time to lament certain aspects of our lives, imagining that they might be otherwise, is a remarkable privilege. The average medieval peasant didn’t have the time or luxury to lament her station in life. Even if she had, she had no means to change it. Her life was what it was.
She had no choice but to, nobly, live it.
People in contemporary western culture need to be honest about the lament they carry. We need spaces and places where we can face our lament together, talk about it, and realize that we are not alone.
But then we need to get to a place where we surrender that lament to God. We continue to acknowledge our lament, but in the same breath we receive and accept the life we have as an incredible gift, and we focus on living that life in love, trusting that loving well is the path to true flourishing and happiness, even if our circumstances aren’t everything we hoped they would be.
So, this is a dynamic, ongoing tension. We don’t pretend everything is fine. We have to be honest about our sadness, with ourselves, with God, and with the most important people in our lives. But neither do we make the mistake of thinking that we would finally be happy if we just changed the circumstances we are currently lamenting about. Shuffling the deck won’t solve the problem.
You will always have lament. Being human is to carry lament, if over nothing else, over who you have yet to become.
The key, it seems to me, is carrying that lament in a healthy way. If we can be honest about it and share it with one another, perhaps we can become the kinds of people who together embrace our imperfect lives as the gifts they are, honoring our promises, loving each other well, and living with the sure and confident hope that one day there will be no more lament to carry.
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