Prayer For Lament

Bring your song, He loves to hear it/Bring Him every prayer soaked lyric/Jesus He's so worthy of it all

            ~Ancient Gates

This song has been running through my mind, but I keep hearing "tear soaked lyric" in my head instead of "prayer."

Prayer can be full of tears just as well as laughter, sorrow as much as joy, but I find myself wishing at least one of the iterations said "tears." That we would find more of a place for sorrow and lament, which we too often lack, in the celebration of Sunday worship. 

We need to know what we were saved from. We need to voice the sorrows and the brokenness that You gave us victory over. And we need to acknowledge the tension of Your Kingdom now and yet to come. Where suffering persists and yet has already been defeated. This is a song You love to hear. A real one. One that brings our every emotion before You. You can have our praise whether it is for presence in the valley or the mountaintop. 

Lord, teach Your Church how to lament. How to give You all of ourselves. How to process with You. Teach us, Lord, to be authentic in the joy and in the sorrow. To hold space for one as much as the other. Strip down our barriers and resistance whether they are born out of culture, pride, a lack of training, or whatever else. Train us in the ways of sorrow, Lord, which all of us will endure, that we would know You in its midst. Teach us how to rejoice in You even as we cry with You. 

Teach us how to sing every song and to bring them all before You without shame but with the safety of a child in their father's arms. You long to hear it all, Lord. If it's in us, You want it because You want us. We lay it all down at Your altar. Teach us how to live in a broken world, holding the hope of eternity now and eternity yet to come. You hold all our brokenness, and You are the path of restoration.