Lament in a Culture of Toxic Positivity
Part 4 of the Lenten Series: The Season We'd Rather Skip
“Everything happens for a reason.” I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard that sentence in a church. After a miscarriage. After a diagnosis. After a death that made no sense and never will. It rolls off the tongue so easily, this little theological bumper sticker, and the person saying it almost always means well. They’re trying to help. They’re trying to offer comfort. But what they’re actually doing is placing a period at the end of someone’s pain before that person has even had a chance to finish their sentence.
We have a positivity problem in the American church. And I don’t mean that we’re too joyful or too hopeful. Joy and hope are beautiful things. I mean that we have built an entire religious culture around the idea that sadness is a problem to be solved, that grief is a season to be rushed through, and that if you sit in your pain for too long something must be wrong with your faith. We have turned optimism into orthodoxy. And it is…