Lament

How do you respond when you come face-to-face with the brokenness of this world?

Sometimes it hits close to home—through the loss of a loved one or a deeply personal injustice. Other times, it confronts us from our screens, headline after headline, filled with cruelty, disasters, and despair.

Our natural responses to this grief can vary. Sometimes, we react with anger, even matching the hatred we despise. Other times, we retreat into denial, choosing comfort over confrontation. Apathy becomes our shield.

But as worshippers of God, we are called to something different. We are called to lament.

To lament is to feel the weight of grief, to mourn deeply—but not without hope. In those moments, our hearts align with the heart of God. Scripture reveals that God grieves. In the story of Noah, we see this clearly: God was grieved that He had made mankind, heartbroken by their violence and hatred. Yet even in that sorrow, He offered hope. Not just through the ark, but ultimately through His Son, Jesus Christ.

The Bible reminds us: we do not mourn like those who have no hope. At the same time, it never asks us to suppress our mourning. We are given the honor of mourning with those who mourn. Jesus demonstrated this as he faced Jerusalem and as he looked at the tomb of Lazarus.

“Grieve what grieves the heart of God.”

Noah, called righteous in a world collapsing under the weight of its own wickedness, must have felt his soul ache with every passing day. He wasn’t just building an ark—he was watching a world he loved rot from the inside out. He walked among people who scoffed at mercy, who had let cruelty become currency, who met the voice of God not with humility, but with clenched fists and calloused hearts. Every murder, every act of abuse, every moment of mockery must have landed in his chest like a blow. He saw humanity, made in God’s image, twisting that image into something unrecognizable.

Surely Noah and his family, exhausted and outnumbered, were tempted to look away—to shield themselves from the horror, to grow numb, to let their own hearts calcify just to survive. It would have been so much easier to stop feeling. But God does not call us to ease; He calls us to tenderness. He invites us to grieve with Him, to ache alongside Him for a world He still longs to redeem.

Even after the rains fell and the ark groaned beneath the weight of salvation, sin was not washed away. When the floodwaters receded, the brokenness clung to the earth like a stain. Noah—faithful, obedient, but still human—could not outrun it. The flood was not the final word. Righteous as he was, Noah was never meant to be the Redeemer. That promise still echoed ahead, waiting to be fulfilled by One who could bear the full weight of the world’s sorrow and still love it back to life.

So what do we do in the meantime?

We ask God to soften our hearts, to help us see the world through His eyes. We do not need to fear lament. In fact, when Christ is at the center of our sorrow, hope remains alive.