When (not if) the bottom drops out of your life...

Are you trying to cope with devastating hurt? Loss? Sadness? Anger? Broken-heartedness? Or _______? (If not right now, it's inevitable that you will, so keep reading.)

Then let it out to God and your closest friends.

I dare you to give it full vent.

Yes, I'm serious.

Be very careful to not prolong and compound your grief by pretending it's all good—or covering it over with a thin layer of spiritual verbiage.

If it hurts, keep it real.

Why?  Because sometimes, life sucks. And some of the most spiritual people in the Bible weren't afraid to express their deepest hurts and pain to God and their friends.

At our times of greatest sorrows, we would do well to learn to grieve as pictured in the book of Lamentations.

Bible in Five: Lamentations on Vimeo.

I know.

In our strange, consumeristic God-wants-you-to-be-happy Christian culture, we don't talk a lot about how to grieve well.

But God sure speaks to this in many places in his Book.

Check out the book of Lamentations now.

Read it. Live it. Grieve it.

Ponder: God wrote a book—Lamentations—that is really just five raw blues songs. How cool is that?

So it's more than okay for your heart to sing the blues—to hurt and express the rawness of that hurt to God. That's deeply biblical. And healing.

Turns out, God can handle it. Expressing our hurting hearts to God doesn't that mean we don't love God. It simply means we're human. And the pain we feel doesn't mean that God doesn't love us—nothing could be further from the truth.

News Flash: Sometimes life totally sucks—even if you love Jesus, tithe, read your Bible, pray, and volunteer in the church.

When the bottom does drop out of our lives, let's not be quick to offer pious and simplistic platitudes to each other. Instead, let's do the right thing—the human thing—the biblical thing—and grieve well together.

"Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn."
—Romans 12:15

God help us all to "weep with those who weep" as our first reaction to all human tragedies.

Now, who in your world needs to read this?

Copy this: http://bit.ly/1lCD88V and share it with them right now.

And thanks for stopping by Cup O' Joe with Bill.


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