I hadn’t heard it in a while, but yesterday I caught Dave Matthews’ "Grace Is Gone" again for the 2000th time. As I sang along, I caught myself fighting back tears. Why?

Because I’m a wuss. Because it’s one of my all-time favorite tunes. Because, even though it’s debated whether the song is about the death of his father or the loss of a girlfriend, I still deeply relate to death and loss. Because I resonate with the song’s lyrics  such as this: 

"I could never love again so much as I love you
Where you end where I begin is like a river going through
Take my heart, my eyes cuz I need them no more
If never again they fall upon the one I so adore"

It’s a beautiful lament of loss and love. I can picture him at the end of the bar with a broken heart and a crushed spirit, pleading with the bartender, "Excuse me, please, one more drink…could you make it strong cuz I don’t need to think…"

It’s raw and honest and painful and nearly hopeless… which is why I love it. And it’s why I struggle with a lot of the sanitized worship we (I) sing most of the time.

In my experiences with God’s refining process (and life in general), there are plenty of times when a good lament is in order. The death of friends. The struggle of Kingdom living. The weight of sin on my every step. Yes, God is good. Yes, better days are ahead. Yes, we shall overcome. But many times the ‘now’ is hard and, although our Hope has come, we still live in the ‘now’.

So where are our songs of lament? Where are our worship tunes that dig deep into the emotion of struggle and pain and hurt that lead us to our Emmanuel Who brings us Hope? Where are our blues? Sometimes, in my personal worship, my heart is not ready for How Great Is Our God (although He is…), and I fear that by always beating that particular drum, we are missing out on another equally great proclamation: that God is great even in suffering. That He understands our feelings of near hopelessness and helplessness. Our crushed expectations and dreams. That, somehow, when we pour out our raw, unfiltered pain at His feet… he heals us in the midst of it all. He doesn’t take us out of it…but walks with us through it. 

And therein lies the beauty.

Is it acceptable to have worship songs of lament? If so, where are they? Why do they not exist? Are we so ‘in the bubble’ that we’ve become anesthetized to real life hurts and struggles and simply continue holding hands and singing our Pie-in-the-Sky songs, hoping that if we sing them enough…we’ll eventually believe them?

Don’t know the song? Watch the video.