Show Notes
What does biblical lament have to do with the way we work, lead, and live faithfully in a fractured world? In this episode of Nuance, host Case sits down with Dr. May Young—author, pastor, and scholar—to explore the surprising power of lament as a formative spiritual practice for believers navigating real-world pressures.
Drawing from her new InterVarsity Press book, Walking with God Through the Valley: Recovering the Purpose of Biblical Lament, Dr. Young shares why lament is more than expressing sorrow—it’s an act of faith, honesty, and hope. From the Psalms to Lamentations, lament gives Christians language for grief, injustice, confusion, and the long road of waiting. It also gives us a public, communal way to name what’s broken while trusting God to establish the work of our hands.
In this conversation, Case and Dr. Young discuss how lament shapes our spiritual life, our workplaces, our leadership, and our communities. They talk about lament in seasons of betrayal or loss, lament in moments of cultural conflict, and how institutions can embrace lament as a way of acknowledging harm and restoring trust. If you’ve ever wondered how to pray when you’re overwhelmed, how to lead when people are hurting, or how to stay grounded when the world feels chaotic, this episode offers a thoughtful and deeply biblical guide.
Episode Resources:
Dr. Young’s website: may-young.com/
Walking with God Through the Valley: Recovering the Purpose of Biblical Lament: amazon.com/dp/1514003961
InterVarsity Press website: http://www.ivpress.com/
Nuance is a podcast of The Collaborative where we wrestle together about living our Christian faith in the public square. Nuance invites Christians to pursue the cultural and economic renewal by living out faith through work every facet of public life, including work, political engagement, the arts, philanthropy, and more.
Each episode, Dr. Case Thorp hosts conversations with Christian thinkers and leaders at the forefront of some of today’s most pressing issues around living a public faith.
Our hope is that Nuance will equip our viewers with knowledge and wisdom to engage our co-workers, neighbors, and the public square in a way that reflects the beauty and grace of the Gospel.
Learn more about The Collaborative:
Website 👉 https://wecolabor.com
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Episode Transcript
Case Thorp
Lament is one of Scripture’s most honest gifts, a language God gives to people who live between promise and fulfillment. The Bible never asks us to pretend the world is better than it is. Instead, it hands us the words of the psalmist who cries, “How long, O Lord?” And it shows us a prophet who stands on a watchtower in Habakkuk 2, waiting for God to answer the ache of injustice. Lament is not despair. It is the faithful refusal to accept brokenness as the final word. Lament also has a public shape. When Jeremiah weeps over his city and lamentations, he’s not only grieving personal loss, he’s naming the wounds of a people and the failures of a great society. His prayer becomes a public act of truth telling that refuses denial. In a similar way, the Psalmist calls the congregation to lament together in Psalm 79 when violence has scarred the community. Scripture gives us a pattern. God’s people cry out not only for private healing, but for public righteousness, restored institutions and the renewal of civic life. Well, friends, this matters for our moment. We inhabit a public square marked by polarization, exhaustion, and the quick impulse to either shout or retreat. Lament gives us another way. It roots us in humility and honesty. It trains us to name sin and to name sorrow without surrendering hope. It prepares us to engage our neighbors with compassion while asking God, “to establish the work of our hands,” as put in Psalm 90. To establish that work in our workplaces and across every sector of society. So today, that is our focus on Nuance. And I’m so glad to welcome Author and Associate Pastor of Biblical Studies at Taylor University, May Young. Dr. Young, welcome to Nuance.
May Young
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Case Thorp
Well, to our viewers and friends, welcome to Nuance as well, where we seek to be faithful in the public square. I’m Case Thorp, and please like, subscribe, and share this episode. It helps us to grow. Well, May has published this new book from InterVarsity Press entitled, Walking with God Through the Valley: Recovering the Purpose of Biblical Lament. I’m trying to hold this up on the screen and I don’t know how narrow it is or not, but it is an outstanding contribution to not only biblical studies but even to the walk of faith, especially if you’re in ministry, how to walk with congregants perhaps, and for anyone to walk with others who are going through tough times. So, May, I wonder, what prompted you to come to this topic, and then what prompted you to write this book?
May Young
Sure. Actually for myself, it actually didn’t arise from a very positive situation as lament itself speaks. So I had a time when I was a young wife and mom and I had to face infidelity from my ex-husband and a whole change of life after that. What that looked like, you know, as we were church planting together. And so kind of a lot of loss and lament. And so when I was grieving through that situation, I think it was just so devastating for me. And I didn’t at that time have much teaching on lament in the church. This was, you know, over 20 years ago that had happened. And so it was very difficult to process things when, you know, I think I grew up in a church where we heard a lot of testimonies after people had overcome things. And so you’re always just hopeful that things are going to change like the next day. But what happens when, you know, the next day things don’t change and you’re still in that same situation? How do you walk through that as a Christian, as one who trusts in the Lord? And so it was through that time I spent a lot of time praying. I spent a lot of time crying. I spent a lot of time in the Psalms, spent a lot of time with the Lord. And what was really beautiful about that was through that time, I realized when we hit rock bottom, He is truly the rock that we can stand on.
And so when I went back for completing my masters of divinity and then moving into my PhD, I really felt drawn to the subject of lament and lamentation just because at that time I didn’t feel like we had enough information in the church to help navigate situations like that. People who walk through a crisis of faith, like what happens? It was too many people. I felt, just felt like, you know, when I really need this, how do I navigate this? And so, yes.
Case Thorp
We gloss things over. I use the phrase that a lot of particularly mainline churches or traditional churches, we worship the idol of middle-class appropriateness. There’s no practice in our tradition of lamenting.
May Young
Yeah, right. And then it’s very sad because, you know, we are called to be honest in our faith. And especially within the church, we’re not called to put up masks or, you know, like to pretend everything’s okay when we’re hurting or broken inside. You know, I think the church should be a place where we can find healing and be able to express…
Case Thorp
To say it’s okay and to teach people how to do it in space and to do it safely.
May Young
Right. Without feeling judged and without feeling like, you know, you can’t really truly express how you feel.
Case Thorp
And so you bring this topic to your studies, to the scriptures, and share with us what you found through that effort.
May Young
Sure. One of the things that I want to do when I say recovering biblical lament is I want to move it beyond what we understand more broadly, that lament is just expressing the reality of suffering. Now that’s true, but it’s actually an act of faith, is what I argue. And what we find in that is that in the book of Psalms, we have different genres that we can find. And one of those genres is lament, and one is individual lament and one is communal or corporate lament. And in fact, the laments genre actually makes up more than even the praise genre when in the book of Psalms. So it’s very significant. Yeah, so one third, about one third of the Psalms are considered lament.
Case Thorp
Really interesting.
May Young
So it’s quite significant that God has given us the prayer book and the songs of the people of Israel to instruct us how to navigate when we’re struggling, when we’re doubting, when we’re dealing with sin, when we’re dealing with a plethora of emotions in this way. And so what I do is I kind of, ground it into this genre in the sense of like, within each genre, there’s different elements that help you to identify. Of course, it’s not always clear cut, but there are certain elements that are found in different types of genre. And so I was doing some reading and research on that and seeing what were some common elements that you can see in biblical lament. And I was able to find five that I talk about throughout my book that identify it and kind of walk through those elements and seeing how they’re helpful as we walk through different situations and how we can apply them to different Psalms of lament. Now, what I liken this to is a lot of times we hear prayers about praying the Lord’s Prayer, right? In the church, the disciples ask Jesus how, teach us how to pray. And so he gives them the Lord’s Prayer.
And so sometimes, you know, when we hear a sermon on the Lord’s Prayer, we hear pastors breaking down just the different sections, you know, Our Father who art in heaven, and then talking a little bit about that. And sometimes we can actually personalize those elements for ourselves as we pray the Lord’s Prayer, or sometimes we can just pray the Lord’s Prayer on its own. So what I see, too, similarly in the Book of Psalms is that we can pray the Psalms as they are of lament, or we can see the elements that are present and personalize them for ourselves to recognize that this is a model and a way that has been given to us with all the different elements of how we can be praying through laments and kind of expressing our feelings, our emotions, our honesty before the Lord. And so kind of seeing all of those things that are prevalent within these prayers in the book of Psalms.
Case Thorp
I resonate with what you say because I teach the Bible a lot. It’s one of my beefs that there’s rampant scriptural illiteracy in the church. So I avoid like a modern book topic or pastoral care topics. I really like scripture. So I often will say, look, there is the full breadth of human emotion in God’s Word. It’s not just the good stuff and the up happy stuff.
May Young
Yes.
Case Thorp
And so that gives room for us, like you say, to express ourselves. Now at funerals, I will often say, and I would love your theological or scriptural correction on this statement of mine, but I will say that lament leads to mourning. This season of lament that is temporary, but with hope and should transition in the life of the believer to a period of mourning. I’d be curious, do you define a difference between the two?
May Young
Well, I think that lament and mourning, sometimes they could be seen as, you know, I wouldn’t say completely synonymous, but there’s a lot more to that. But I think within lament and with mourning, it could lead to hope. You know, I would see it leading through the mourning. And I think it’s in that lamenting and that mourning that sometimes we need to walk through that process to be able, because you can’t jump. Anybody who’s dealing with very difficult situations cannot just snap out of it, just like that. It’s unrealistic for us to expect that within the church, to expect people just to snap out of it. Like, why are you sad? We have so much hope. But it’s like to actually be realistic, to walk through that, and see that as a process and to recognize that we as humans have this process that we can really walk through to bring us to greater hope. We don’t have to stay in lament. We don’t have to stay in mourning, but it actually leads to that.
Case Thorp
I was really unaware of the idea of lament and a practical sense of my walk of faith until my colleague Tanner Fox, a wonderful young man on our staff, who’s very much a millennial and as this Gen Xer, I’ve appreciated his stretching of me on some things. And he very much has embraced the idea of lament and brings it to our staff, brings it to our church conversation. And so I’ve grown in an appreciation for its goodness and its place. I think back to how culturally, maybe just a hundred, 200 years ago, when you lost a husband, women would often wear the various colors of mourning over time. I had a great, great aunt, somebody back in the chain who I’m told in family history, did a full method of mourning, wear black for a year, purple for six months, Navy for six months. There were all these step down levels of demonstrating that process in which she was going through. And today though, we don’t do that really at all that I can see. And so I think it cuts people short from knowing this is a good thing to go through.
May Young
Yeah. That’s right. And I think that’s true. And I think that’s why maybe sometimes, you know, if a person experiences loss, like within the church, and let’s say a year later, people are kind of surprised that they’re still dealing with it because they almost feel like they’re cutting it short. They don’t realize that sometimes, you know, a year later, there’s holidays that really bring up those, you know, feelings again, and, you know, the loss and…instead of just rushing people through these things to walk with them, to help them as they’re, you know, and not all of it has to be negative. Some of it is just to help them to remember the positive things, to, yeah, and to have that commemoration within there too.
Case Thorp
We’ve had success, perhaps you’re familiar with a Blue Christmas service. So it’s, have you heard of this?
May Young
No I’ve not…
Case Thorp
It’s really creative, in the first two or so weeks of December, before you get to the craziness of Christmas, it’s an evening service where those who have lost someone the past year or anybody that wants to come and mourn and lament can come and we will have a very intentional liturgy that embraces lament and of course singing, times of silence, and a short scriptural reflection that does lead exactly to that hope.
May Young
Wow, that’s amazing.
Case Thorp
Yeah, we didn’t invent it. We learned it from someone else along the way. I read recently that Alexander Hamilton’s wife, she wore black every day until she died and she lived 50 more years. And so I think, you know, that may not lend itself towards the hope portion, the appropriate time to lament and mourn, but then, okay. Now we need to live into the hope and the joy of life here and today.
So in your book, you have these various chapters. And I think a moment ago, you mentioned the various sorts of lament. So you have lament and sin repentance, lament and doubt and questions, lament with injustice, lament with loneliness or abandonment, lament with sickness and pain and then lament with death and loss. Those are really powerful categories. Speak to me about injustice because we like to emphasize faith in the public square and how people listening are being good citizens, are serving their greater community and particularly in their workplace. And I think injustice is a big part of that. Tell us more about it.
May Young
Sure, and this is where it would kind of border on a category of Psalms called imprecation. So imprecatory Psalms, which is sometimes difficult for us when we read those Psalms, it’s like almost like imprecation calling down, if you will, like even curses or something like that. What does that mean? Can we pray that as believers today? Was this even appropriate for, you know, scripture itself? There’s a plethora of different views that people have held on these particular expressions and Psalms here in Scripture. You don’t even find it just in the Psalms. You even find it in the book of Revelation where it talks about how long the martyrs are calling out to God in that way too. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, just recompense in those ways.
Case Thorp
That’s right. I love that scene there underneath the altar and crying out.
May Young
So I think there’s, you know, we don’t want to just relegate it to just an Old Testament kind of understanding, you know, but within my chapter, I do talk about, how do we deal with these kinds of language and these kinds of Psalms, in light of, you know, how do we love our enemies in the midst of all these things. So there’s this, kind of almost competing thoughts, if you will. But I think there’s a place here where we are, when we’re praying these things and asking and crying out, we are in some ways asking and recognizing that things are not right. And I’m not saying that these, these imprecatory psalms or implications are something to be taken and prayed lightly. It’s not like someone took your parking space and you’re going to pray those kind of, you know what I mean? These are for really serious situations.
Case Thorp
Systemic.
May Young
Yes, exactly. And you’re calling together even a community to call out injustice, to name that as a community as well, and to speak truth to injustice and say that it’s wrong. So I do think that there’s a place and it’s a prayer asking God. It’s not like these people are taking this into their own hands. So we don’t see them going up and taking this, they’re actually bringing up to the Lord. And these are what we’re called to do. Like we need to have more places of praying instead of, you know, and lifting these issues to God, who is the judge and who is just and righteous instead of just us thinking that we know what’s right and just.
Case Thorp
Yeah. It’s our turn, right. Well, you lift up in that chapter Psalm 94 and the closing verses of that Psalm fits with what you’re saying. The wicked band together against the righteous and condemn the innocent to death. But Yahweh has become my fortress and my God, the Rock in whom I take refuge. He will repay them for their sins and destroy them for their wickedness. Yahweh our God will destroy them.
May Young
That’s right.
Case Thorp
So it’s leaving him to do the justice. We are in the position of lament and prophetic voice.
Very interesting. So I’m writing a book and I have been interested and I’ve got a section on it on something that I was not clear about. But when Martin Luther King Jr. led the march into Selma over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, that it was actually a three-day affair. It wasn’t just a one-time deal. And he was not there, actually, the first day when the violence took place. John Lewis was leading that march. He did come for the next day and led the people up to the pinnacle of the bridge and they could look down towards, once again, the police forces there to enact pain and horror and violence. And they prayed and then he turned around and started walking back off the bridge. And before all of these marches they would gather in a sanctuary nearby and have hours of worship and prayer and the lament portion of things, the singing of the deep African-American spirituals and other songs that prepared their heart to go out then and face persecution.
And it’s so moving and I think the richness of that music, it helps me to understand it more as that crying out of the heart in the pattern of the psalmist more so than just, cultural expression and nice African-American music. No, it’s more than that.
May Young
Yeah, definitely an expression of their heart and calling out to God. And I think that’s so important and maybe that’s an element that we’re missing, you know, within the church today.
Case Thorp
And it makes me mindful, even in our worship service, we need to name an injustice or just a horror, the wars going on right now. And we’re not going to tell you what to think about Putin or Gaza or any of the rest, but we can just sit in our sadness that these things have to happen and are happening. So if you would help us think through people in their work, in their everyday lives. Any insight on how lament shapes the way believers engage the pressures and disappointments of work?
May Young
Sure, I do think that one of the things that’s really helpful when we think about lament is it really puts us into a place of faith and vulnerability before God. So that we’re asking Him for help, kind of like what we were just talking about. So I think sometimes in the workplace, we get so busy, we think, we’ve got this. And we forget about God until the end of the workday.
You know, we’re just trying to manage everything and think about how we can, you know, fix this issue, put out this fire, do this. And it’s really more of coming from our own strength. So I think, when we’re dealing with something about the honesty of lament and prayer, it’s almost in a sense, you know, helping us to recognize that the Lord is our helper. He is there to help us with our work. He’s there to help us in our difficult situations and things that we can’t figure out. You know, things and dealing with coworkers, dealing with a project, dealing with, you know, whatever might come and being able to lament that, being able to say, maybe I messed up on this, Lord, can you help me? You know, or instead of like, how can I fix this? And how do I, you know what I mean? So instead of just jumping to, yes, we always rush to the fixing as if we have that power to do that and sometimes we do but sometimes we fall short and then we’re very discouraged and we don’t know how to move forward and it only just piles upon us and we’re not processing through this but there’s this layer of discouragement that could be upon us because we failed or we weren’t able to meet up to the task or we don’t know how to really love our co-worker, but how do we process this so that we can deal with it and ask the Lord to help us and invite him into those situations?
Case Thorp
And I learned in my earlier days as a pastor that’s translated over even into my friendships, don’t rush people in painful places. I’m a fixer by instinct and I would want to fix their pain too quickly. And I’ve learned to sit in that and I’ve seen people in the workplace that just won’t make the time. You have to take time for lament and they don’t want to necessarily allocate the energy because it’s exhausting.
May Young
Yes, yes. They would rather, and I spent some time talking about it in some parts of my book that talk about we would rather avoid these uncomfortable situations and kind of not deal with our issues or our pains, but they don’t go away. They will come up in other ways. And I talked about that a little bit too. Even health-wise, it can affect us in our health if we start to suppress these feelings or in this way.
Case Thorp
Yeah, the Psalmist talks about, I forget which one, maybe 50 or 51 of psychosomatic “I Can’t Sleep at Night” and the way in which it can disrupt.
May Young
Yes, it can be very disruptive to our health or even in ways that, you know, it may not happen right now, but years down the road. We don’t even realize that that was just as a result of many years of not dealing with issues because at the moment we’re too busy or it’s too hard. We don’t want to face it. We’d rather keep ourselves and that’s the ties through, you know, entertainment or busyness.
Case Thorp
For sure. Amusement is the negative in Greek and your muse is that which gives you creative inspiration. So an amusement is the exact opposite. So one in practice, I have often taught through our fellowships. We have some wonderful long-term deep experiences. And particularly the Gotham Fellowship, one for those in the workplace. One of the exercises we do is to take the Psalms of lament and learn to pray them and learn to put ourselves in the place of the psalmist, the voice that is making such a cry, and to perhaps exchange some of the specifics that the psalmist is lamenting for our own situations. And I find that very helpful.
May Young
Yeah, I think that was kind of what I was saying too, we can personalize like the Lord’s Prayer, just like we do that, we could do that with the Psalms of Lament as well. And it is very helpful.
Case Thorp
And even finding another coworker to lament with us. That’s not too much to ask and I know that very good friends would be glad to jump at the opportunity to help folks. Moving from the personal to the institutional, institutions often struggle to deal honestly with grief or failure. So how might a theology of lament help leaders build healthier, more resilient workplaces?
May Young
Sure, and I did talk about within my book that I had partook in an institutional lament service that was helpful. So kind of even, and this is a Christian institution that was of course putting that forward. So I’m sure you can’t necessarily do that if it’s not a Christian corporation. Maybe you could as part of within a sector within there but what was really helpful was you know there was some hurt that had happened, a lot of, you know, people were hurt by some decisions that were made by leaders and then there was a switch in administration and the switch in administration actually recognized that and wanted to have a lament service to be able to lament that some of the hurts and some of the things and to give space for that and have a liturgy and give people time to pray and to heal and even that acknowledgement. And after that service, there was actually a lot of people who felt better. They felt like they were seen. So a lot of it sometimes is when we’re dealing with a corporation or something, decisions that are made, people feel like they’re unseen. They don’t realize that the administration sees them. And so that actually helped them, I think, to be able to move forward and, you know, with greater hope in the future, on decisions or things that are going to happen. So in some ways, that acknowledgement, that grieving really actually brought greater hope within the community to move forward together. So I do think that there’s a place to do it together and to show people that they’re not alone, they’re seen, that these things did happen, acknowledgement of that. Because sometimes people feel like decisions that affected them, that it’s not being acknowledged even. And so they feel it’s difficult.
Case Thorp
Right. And that acknowledgement is not necessarily agreement or preference for the way something was handled. I saw this in our denomination. I’m in an evangelical Presbyterian Church. And after the George Floyd incident and in the difficult times of the pandemic, we had a committee of our assembly work on a paper of lament for racial division and such. And it was a bit controversial and I found those who were arguing against it were trying to say, you are woke, you are buying into all these progressive perspectives and you’re trying to heap white guilt. And actually, I felt very convicted about this. It was an attempt to speak into the culture of a biblical way to manage these things rather than to adopt any of the secular approaches.
And behind it, I found the fear from some that to lament was to agree with things that philosophically or politically they disagreed with. And it was more the younger generation, the Gen-Xers and Millennials who were trying to say it’s one thing to acknowledge and to stand, especially with our people of color who are pastors and elders and such, to just say this stinks and should not happen, short of trying to say why it’s happened and how to fix it.
May Young
Right. No, I agree. And I think that’s beautiful, amazing too. So that they felt seen even in the midst of that too, you know.
Case Thorp
And one of the points that came down to saying to one who objected, why won’t you just acknowledge that one of our African American brothers in particular, a friend of mine, just wants it to be acknowledged that this is hard and that that was a hill to climb. It passed with, my goodness, 97, 98% agreement and I’m glad that happened. But I think that exercise was also teaching us corporately how to lament and that was a hill to climb. And I think it was a good hill to climb.
May Young
Yeah, and I actually think about, you know, the Book of Lamentations, like chapter one, where, you know, Lady Jerusalem, she acknowledged her sin, you know, but she also had a lot of suffering. And she was saying, you know, there’s no comforter here. So she was looking for someone who can be a witness, like a theology of witness, to witness someone’s pain. And that doesn’t mean like, everything you did was right and perfect, but you’re also recognizing that this is horrific. This is hard. This is a struggle, and we see.
Case Thorp
This is hard. I want to read this excerpt that you have put in your book. It’s called Ingrid’s Story, page 127. And what I appreciate about your book is that there are number of sidebars with a different sort of text and color to sort of separate out some real life applications to these concepts. So let me read this. “For 15 years, I steadily built…” and this is from Ingrid, right? Is Ingrid real or fictional?
May Young
Yeah. These are all real. All the people that I talk about, this is their own story. It’s a real story.
Case Thorp
Okay, so this is from Ingrid. “For 15 years, I steadily built my business with integrity, developing products to help self-employed and small business owners through large national insurance carriers. I tithed faithfully, gave freely, and sought to build good relationships with my staff, agents, clients, and vendors. My business grew to 1,000 agents selling our products with 350 being paid commissions in the Chicagoland area alone. My titles included wife, mother, entrepreneur, business owner, friend, and Director of Women’s Ministries at my local church. And I had just added the role of student in a master divinity program. With this last edition of student, I entrusted more of my business operations to the person who had worked with me for seven years.”
Wow. She’s built all this up and it sounds like a person who is not used to trials, suffering, obstacles. Tell us more about Ingrid and why she made it in here.
May Young
Yeah, because she actually dealt with a lot of injustice in her life and this embezzlement that happened as a result of trusting this employee and losing a lot of her finance that she had built up in this way. So I asked her to talk about how she processed this, you know, before the Lord and how she was able to come out of this with greater hope in God and deeper in her relationship. You know, she’s actually a very good friend of mine. And so she’s doing great, even though, you know, financially she was put through the wringer, even personally, she was put through the wringer. But, you know, through all of this, actually, she was able to do her research on evil. And so it’s really amazing just what the Lord has done to use that and to even redeem that as she lamented and she really lifted up this whole situation to God. And her whole entire life, it’s really just about a surrender to Him.
Case Thorp
When I was in seminary, and I’ve written about this a good bit and shared it publicly, myself and two friends were accused of racism in a public setting on the seminary grounds. And it erupted into a huge campus debate. It was hard. Students who were making such accusations wore black at a protest for a number of days. The incident occurred in the cafeteria. They boycotted the cafeteria. And so in that time, the psychological pressure, the emotional pressure was tremendous. But I think to that point, the most I’d ever experienced. And there was a psalm. And at the moment, I’m not bringing up the number. I’ve got it written down in the margin of my Bible that I just would sit and read over and over and over again. And I can just remember being in that dorm room and having that time with the Lord and digesting those words and internalizing those words. And it helped remind me that He is my ultimate judge and safe place.
It talked about adversaries and sometimes it’s a little hard because I didn’t want to demonize the adversaries who were making such an accusation, but boy, the Psalmist certainly did. But I did, I guess, relate in that I knew some who were making those accusations were reasonable and able to talk about it and figure out the truth, as opposed to some who just assumed a bunch of hooey and ran with their deductions. Thankfully that resolved we were exonerated and the campus came back to normal but…
May Young
But that’s tough to walk through. Wow.
Case Thorp
And I didn’t even know the word. I guess I didn’t realize what I was doing.
May Young
Right, yes, exactly, because sometimes we lament and we’re doing this and we didn’t even know because there was no other way to process it. Almost like we’re brought to our knees, you know?
Case Thorp
Right. Yeah. Well, I turned to the thing I knew brought me life, which was the Lord through His Word. And so I turned to His Word.
In closing here, if someone is dealing with the struggles of their workplace, what concrete steps would you give them to think about and to go do to help make their witness at work even more strong?
May Young
Well, definitely, you know, if, within my book, just to get familiar too with some of the elements and what that looks like within lament psalms and to personalize that and to see how these elements are even relevant, like the address or invocation seems so simple. That’s the first element that you find in these lament Psalms. But I think that’s like when you familiarize yourself with that, it’s like the psalmist…what’s really interesting as you saw, like I compared it to like ancient Near East prayers and how they’re a little bit different. Like what you find in the Bible is that these psalms just go straight into prayer and asking God, Lord, you know, see, and it’s just like, so it’s like that first step is just turning to God when we’re going through, you know, maybe injustice, when we’re going through failure, when we’re going through, you know, so instead of kind of pushing it aside or not dealing with it because you’re too busy in the workplace or even throughout the day, but you take that moment and you turn to God.
Case Thorp
I like what I heard you saying that is to know them beforehand, read them beforehand, so that when the moment hits you know where to go.
May Young
That’s right, exactly. And just taking that first step, I think sometimes the first step is the hardest when you’re not used to it, is to turn. You know, like, wait, I’m not going to try and fix this myself. Let me turn to God. You know, let me pray. Let me take a moment here and ask God to help me.
Case Thorp
Well, May, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time and I appreciate your work. Look forward to reading more. Do you have another project in the works?
May Young
Yeah, I’m actually working on a commentary for the book of Lamentations. It’s going to come out in a few years with the Pillar series.
Case Thorp
Well, that’s great. We’ll have to look for that. Friends, if you’d like to read more of May’s work, I want to encourage you to go get the book, Walking with God Through the Valley: Recovering the Purpose of Biblical Lament, published by Intervarsity Press. You can find it at Amazon as well as at ivpress.com. You can also check out Dr. Young’s website, may-young.com, and it is going to be updated and a little more fancy soon.
Well, that brings us to the close of today’s conversation. Thank you so much for choosing to spend your time with us, and thank you, our listeners and readers. If this episode resonated with you, the best way to spread the word is simple. Share it with another who might need to hear it. Who is going through a tough time right now and maybe needs to learn the joy and the hope that comes through lament?
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I’m Case Thorp, and God’s blessings on you.
