Lament to Creativity: From the Dung and the Dark 

“I will make you a solemn promise.”³⁸ 

Out of Wilbur’s deepest sorrows comes his most creative strategy. He bribes Templeton with his best offer, his slops. Author Andy Crouch shows a profound understanding of this concept when he writes, “Lament is the seed of creativity.”³⁹ Indeed, suffering can be the womb of new beginnings. The Jews in Babylon are told to do good to the city where they’re held in exile. Even the great tribulation, the greatest suffering of the end times, is supposed to usher in the second coming of Christ. 

Grace unlocks our ability to forge through wrongs and painful feelings and do something constructive. We’re to comfort others with the comfort God gives us. The key is to first own the sorrow, reaffirm trust in God, and listen to His still, small voice intimating of how He can use you to love others. Healing comes with acts of obedience. 

This transition from deep distress to expressions of trust in God is the litany in many psalms. “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God” (Ps. 42:11). 

Believe that in the crisis of deepest darkness, there are seeds of new beginnings, of fresh living and creating from those tears, life arising from the ashes. As the staff of the More House in Bridgeport, Connecticut, maintain: “Your misery is your ministry.” 

^“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too” (2 Cor. 1:3–5). 

Prayer: Lord, redeem my “deep-in-the-mud-pit” situation and through this hurt bring something good into the world.