Tear stains on the delicate pages of my Bible mark one of my lowest points throughout our miscarriages. After losing three babies back-to-back-to-back within a year, my crushed heart just couldn’t bear up under the weightiness of the negative pregnancy test I held in my hands. It was the time where I was most deeply grieved, feeling nearly forsaken by God. With desperation I cried out to him for comfort, for a reprieve from grief.
“How long, O Lord?”
David’s prayer of lament sprung from my lips (Psalm 13:1). An avalanche of tears followed until words could no longer be spoken with clarity. I took comfort in the fact that the Spirit was interceding the groans of my heart (Romans 8:26). Groans like, “Lord, why do you keep taking our babies?”
Recurrent miscarriage had led me to the depths, echoing heartfelt prayers of previous suffering saints. Miscarriage can cause a woman to “drench her couch with her weeping” as I did that day (Psalm 6:6). Surely, “my eyes wasted away because of grief ” (Psalm 6:7). God is the giver of all good gifts, but it began to feel like all God did was take from me. If you’ve felt that way too, you’re not alone.
This was a turning point for me, though I didn’t know it at the time. When I look back, I recognize it as the moment I began to understand a key truth: lament is a necessary part of the Christian walk. Though I’m a deep feeler and an easy crier, I had to open my heart up to lament. Heavy burdens had been placed on my back under the banner of “suffering well,” which left little to no room for a heart burdened with sadness. My husband and I walked through our losses in an environment that seemed to view sorrow as evidence of faithlessness and self-pity. Being downcast was often spoken of as if it were sinful. Yet, Scripture never makes that case. My honest prayers of lament were smothered by an unbiblical model of what it looks like to suffer as a disciple of Jesus. I had to learn the dirge of lament. I had to learn that it was okay to go to God with my deepest groans. The three sweet babies who slipped through my fingers and out of my womb were my guides, each leading me one step further in my journey of lament and ultimately closer to God.
What is Biblical Lament?
Simply put, biblical lament is the act of crying out to God in our sorrow. We bring him everything that’s broken in us—our body, our heart, our mind—and we lay it bare before the only one who can heal us. The only one who can truly envelop us with a blanket of comfort. Biblical lament is leading us somewhere. Rather than just complaining to complain, it’s the act of crying out to our loving Father for help. Lament leads the believer into deeper communion with God. Lament is worship.
Scripture is not silent on this topic. There are many examples showing us we are free to approach God with tear-streaked cheeks and pain in our hearts. There’s a whole book titled Lamentations. Job calls out to the Lord in his compounded grief after losing his children, servants, livelihood, and finally his health. Hannah, who suffered years of infertility, “was deeply distressed and prayed to the Lord and wept bitterly.” She was so inconsolable that Eli, the priest, mistook her to be drunk (1 Samuel 1:10–14). We, like Hannah, can pour out our soul before the Lord (1 Samuel 1:15). These stories of fellow sufferers are a balm to women walking through the grief of losing a baby in the womb.
Where are you, Lord? Have you forgotten me? When will you intervene? Why are you sleeping? Why do you hide your face from me? These gut-wrenching questions and accusations written down for us by the Holy Spirit in God’s holy word are proof that we can— and should—bring all of our wrestlings, questions, and emotions to God. We don’t need to hide our grief, anger, or confusion from him—we can’t. He knows every word on our tongue before we speak it (Psalm 139:4).
In many of the psalms of lament (though not all of them), we watch as the writer moves from prayer to praise somewhat quickly. A lot of Christians point out that though these particular psalms start with a psalmist in torment, he turns around in the end and rejoices in God. Many want to hurry past the “Will you forget me forever?” and jump straight to the “I will sing to the Lord, because he has dealt bountifully with me” (Psalm 13:6). We’d rather skip through the grief and camp out in the praise and thanksgiving. That’s a natural response. None of us want to hurt, nor do we like to see others suffer. But grief and lament aren’t tidy. The steps we take toward God while in distress certainly won’t be marked by perfection. Instead, they’re full of stumbling and struggling and fighting to keep going.
Lament is perseverance in faithfulness: A faith held up and sustained by Christ amidst devastation. When everything falls apart, lament is a holy pursuit of our holy God. It’s how we worship from the depths.
Why would we run to God with our sorrowful and desperate prayers over our baby? Because we know he is good and sovereign. He is the source of true comfort (2 Corinthians 1:3–5). Biblical lament is an act of worship because it echoes these truths to the world around us and to our own hearts. In his book, Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy, Mark Vroegop describes lament as “a prayer in pain that leads to trust.”
Lament is how we turn to God in prayer when faced with the sorrow of miscarriage. If we don’t know how to do this or aren’t willing to open our hearts to God in this way, we miss out on the joy of communion with him and experiencing his comfort. We cannot escape suffering in this world. We are promised it will come for each of us. Lament helps us know where to go when the heartbeat can’t be found, when the pregnancy symptoms vanish, or when one miscarriage turns into two, then three, and then four. It reminds us that when it seems like no one understands or cares about the babies we’ve lost, God, our Father, does.
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This is an excerpt from Lost Gifts: Miscarriage, Grief, and the God of All Comfort (Lexham Press, 2025).
