Lament in a Culture of Toxic Positivity

Part 4 of the Lenten Series: The Season We'd Rather Skip

Photo by Ksenia Chernaya: www.pexels.com

“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 destroying people.

The Day Everything Changed

My twin brother and his wife were expecting a baby girl. Her name was Ellington. I remember the excitement in his voice when he told me. I remember the plans being made for her arrival. And then Ellington was stillborn.

What happened next is the part that still makes me angry. Not at God (although that definitely happened), but at the theology that showed up uninvited to my brother’s grief. People who loved him and meant well began saying the things that Christians say when they don’t know what else to do. God has a plan. She’s in a better place. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Everything happens for a reason. Every single one of those sentences landed on my brother like a brick. Because what he heard underneath all of that well-meaning theology was that God wanted his daughter to die. That this was the plan all along. That the God who supposedly loved him had designed this nightmare on purpose.

I couldn’t let that stand. I sat with my brother and I told him something that I believed with everything in me. God didn’t want this. God didn’t plan this. God is heartbroken too. And I watched something shift in his eyes when he heard that. Not because I had all the answers. I didn’t. But because for the first time someone had given him permission to grieve without having to pretend it was all part of some divine blueprint.

My twin brother and his wife meeting their daughter Ellington.

The Problem with Blueprint Theology

Jessica Kelley knows this territory better than most. When her four-year-old son Henry was diagnosed with brain cancer, the Christian cliches came pouring in. God’s will. Divine design. The Lord’s perfect plan. In her book Lord Willing?, Kelley dismantles what she calls “blueprint theology,” the widespread belief that God has a detailed plan for everything that happens, including the most horrific suffering imaginable. She argues that this framework doesn’t just fail to comfort people, it actively harms them. Because if God planned your child’s death then either God is cruel or your grief is an act of rebellion against his sovereignty. Neither of those options leaves room for an honest relationship with the divine.

And I want to pause here because it’s Women’s History Month and I think Kelley’s work deserves far more attention than it gets. She writes with the authority of someone who has walked through the worst thing a parent can experience and come out the other side with a faith that is more honest and more beautiful than the one she started with. If you haven’t read Lord Willing?, put it on your list. It might change the way you think about God and suffering forever.

Lament Is Not a Lack of Faith

Here’s what toxic positivity in the church gets wrong. It assumes that grief and faith are opposites. That if you’re lamenting then you must not be trusting. That sadness is evidence of spiritual failure. But the scriptures tell a completely different story. The Psalms are full of lament. Nearly a third of them are psalms of complaint or sorrow or raw, unfiltered anguish directed straight at God. David didn’t sugarcoat his pain. He didn’t slap a worship chorus on top of his grief and pretend everything was fine. He screamed at God. He asked why. He said things that would get him escorted out of most contemporary worship services.

And God never once told him to stop.

Jesus himself wept at the tomb of Lazarus. Think about that for a second. He knew he was about to raise Lazarus from the dead. He knew the resurrection was coming. And he still wept. Because the pain was real and the loss was real and the appropriate response to real suffering is tears.

Lent gives us permission to sit in that space. The whole season is an invitation to stop pretending, stop performing, stop rushing to the happy ending. We spend so much of the year sprinting toward Easter that we forget the road there goes straight through the valley. And the valley is part of the path.

What If We Stopped Fixing and Started Sitting

If you’ve ever been in pain and had someone try to fix it with a Bible verse or a platitude, you know how isolating that feels. It doesn’t feel like love. It feels like being told to shut up in religious language. And if you’ve ever been the person offering those platitudes (I have, more times than I want to admit), then Lent is an invitation to repent of that impulse and learn a different way.

The most Christlike thing you can do for someone who is suffering is not to explain their pain. It’s to sit in it with them. No answers. No silver linings. No “at least” statements. Just presence. Just the willingness to say I don’t know why this happened and I’m not going to pretend I do but I am here and I am not leaving.

That’s what I tried to do for my brother. I didn’t have a theology of suffering neatly packaged and ready to deliver. I just had the conviction that God was not the author of his pain and that his grief was not a problem to be solved. Ellington mattered. Her absence mattered. And no amount of positive thinking or theological spin was going to make that less true.

Try This

This week, resist the urge to fix someone’s pain. If someone in your life is grieving or struggling or just having a hard time, practice the ministry of presence instead of the ministry of answers. Sit with them. Listen. Let the silence be uncomfortable. And if you’re the one in pain right now, give yourself permission to lament. You are not failing at faith. You are practicing the most ancient and biblical form of it. The Psalms have been waiting for you.

In memory of Ellington McLaine Stringer - January 21, 2018

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If this essay meant something to you today, would you consider sharing it with someone who might need to hear it? So much of the damage done by toxic positivity happens because people don't know there's another way to think about God and suffering. Sharing this might be the thing that gives someone permission to grieve honestly for the first time. And if you're not yet subscribed, I'd love to have you along for the rest of this Lenten journey. We've got a few more weeks to go.

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