Hold Fast.

I grew up equating spiritual success with "spiritual high" -- like camp and conference experiences, when the mountain is all you know and what you love and God is so colorfully exalted, with people giddy and exclaiming and bursting with joyful emotion...  Yet the years age me, the experiences awaken me, and the God of all emotion teaches me....

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I drove home quietly in the dark, heavy from Stories Night, ruminating on Jeremiah and lament and the actual tenacity and courage and strength to hold fast.

The women talked about abortion, about divorce, about death.  Lots of death.  They talked about hope and love and hardship.  About community and crying out.  About clinging to God, with bleeding fingernails gripping the cliff of faith, but that even if their faith fails and they fall, He is the Everlasting Arms that catches.

I couldn't help but land there.  On being caught by Him, in His strength, His love, His loyalty, in such immense hardship, betrayal, tragedy, or sin.  And about how maybe that is more spiritual than the mountain.  About how maybe that requires and pronounces more faith than the high.  That the low of lament might be the vulnerable nakedness that exposes the actual core of faith, or creates room for its roots to grow.

There is very little bragging, no room for pious, and all pretentiousness is slaughtered by the time one is crawling in lament, living in Jeremiah, appreciating Job.  When the heart of Psalms beats with the wounded, the miry clay is thick, but the faith that muddles through it is strengthened in the struggle.

Lament threads through those I know.  Through those I honor and adhere to.  Deep hurt, scars, pain, and loss transform the "put-together" person into an honest friend, a tearful warrior, a fierce believer.  The existence of hardship carves out soil for surety, and whittles one down to a shred where only God is secure, and even that relies on His faithfulness and promise, because the human adhering to him is weak and wearisome.

Yet the stories that gurgle out of the mud of gloom, that speak of heaven in the coffin of death, that learn to know His love in the lament, are ones that speak so powerfully, so deeply to the hearts of all the people.  Because to know, cling to, grasp, lean on, and hold fast to the God in lament, is the greatest reflection of courage and Christ the earth shall ever see.