“Lament deals with reality. It presupposes a God who hears, who loves, and who is powerful; this is the basis for lament, which is a combination of complaint, grief, questions, confusion, desire for rescue, and expectation of divine faithfulness. …
Any attitude that emphasizes hope while ignoring lament comes from a naïve and unrealistic optimism that contradicts our actual experiences. Lamenting without hope, on the other hand, is equally unrealistic, a kind of unfaithful cynicism that ignores God’s activity and crushes us in its unrelenting despair. Sometimes we find Christians who then avoid both lament and hope, but that is the path of detached stoicism, not Christian hopeful realism.”
—Kelly Kapic