“My groans are many and my heart is faint.”

Leviticus 1:22

With instruments, it’s the dark hollow part that makes the sound. The string vibrates, but it is the chamber of the guitar that amplifies the sound. The bow across the string of the violin vibrates. But it is bouncing back and forth of those vibrations in the dark hollow of the violin that sends the voice into the world. The hammer hits the piano string, but the power of the notes is in the string chamber where the sound bounces back and forth and all over before bursting forth into your ears. 

Perhaps we don’t need to be scared of the dark places in our soul–It is from here that the music breaks forth.

The agony of grief sings its own song of praise. Sometimes the song of our praise is the sound of our weeping. The rattling of our broken hearts raises a song of glory.

These songs hurt. They etch a tapestry of pain in the chambers of our hearts. And yet, it is these songs of lament and these melodic cries of our misery that are, in their own beautiful way, a hymn of defiance. Our notes of anguish are still that—notes. To sing in the face of lament is its own way of leaning into the Lord.

There is a reason that so many of our hymns and songs of praise are in a minor key. A funeral dirge is no less a song of praise than an Easter Sunday anthem of hope and glory.

Today, we celebrate that ours is a God who does not demand that our faith always be cheerful. 

Today we celebrate that ours is a God who sits in the ash heap of our misery and listens to our cries. God with us—Emmanuel. And He hears our sobs as a canticle of praise. 

Today we lean into our cries of grief—current grief, past grief, future grief—and see them as a hymn of defiance against the brokenness of the world. For we know that grief and struggle is not our natural habitat. It is not our home. As much as pain is part of our story, brokenness is not the end of the story–not the end of your story. The cries from the dark hollows of your soul resonate and reverberate into melodies in the ear of a God who heals.

This is our song. Pain may be here with you in the night but joy comes in the morning…

So keep singing, even if it is in a minor key.

When was a time you sang in a minor key, but it helped you see Jesus more clearly?