Draw Near: Lenten Devotional by Lynne Baab, illustrated by Dave BaabTwo Hands: Grief and Gratitude in the Christian LifeA Renewed SpiritualityNurturing Hope: Christian Pastoral Care in the Twenty-First CenturyThe Power of ListeningJoy Together: Spiritual Practices for Your CongregationSabbath Keeping FastingPrayers of the Old TestamentPrayers of the New TestamentSabbathFriendingA Garden of Living Water: Stories of Self-Discovery and Spiritual GrowthDeath in Dunedin: A NovelDead Sea: A NovelDeadly Murmurs: A NovelPersonality Type in CongregationsBeating Burnout in CongregationsReaching Out in a Networked WorldEmbracing MidlifeAdvent Devotional

Grief and thankfulness at the same time or back and forth?

Lynne Baab • Friday November 19 2021

Grief and thankfulness at the same time or back and forth?

Two years ago I began a journey of trying to hold grief in one hand and thankfulness in the other. The journey resulted in a series of blog posts (see below) and a new book. As a part of the journey, I found myself asking a question. Do we hold grief and gratitude in two hands equally at the same time? Or is one hand or the other sometimes more prominent?

I looked at lament psalms that describe grief. They almost always follow a pattern of sadness/anger/grief followed by thankfulness/praise. These psalms imply that we grieve and then we move out of...

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Lament after Thanksgiving

Lynne Baab • Wednesday December 2 2020

Lament after Thanksgiving

Lament is a big part of my prayers these days. In my lifetime, I have never experienced so much sadness, grief and pain when I look around at our world. Maybe if I had lived in Europe during World War 2 or Rwanda during the genocide in 1994, I might have had this much to lament.  But this pain is unprecedented for me, and lament prayers come easily these days.

My American friends and family members have just celebrated Thanksgiving, and I know they spent some time thinking about what they are thankful for. We have entered Advent, a season of looking...

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Grief AND thankfulness: The role of lament

Lynne Baab • Saturday January 11 2020

Grief AND thankfulness: The role of lament

As a young Christian in my twenties, I was taught to pray using the ACTS pattern: adoration, confession, thankfulness, supplication. Several decades had passed before I realized the prayers in the Bible, especially in the Psalms, contained other prayer components, such as lament, silence and statements of trust. (I wrote a blog post about that.)

For the past two months, I’ve embraced the challenge of holding grief in one hand and thankfulness in the other hand. For the hand that’s holding grief, I have been wondering what exactly is the connection with lament. Are lament and grief the same? Is lament the...

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Creative prayer with Jeremiah

Lynne Baab • Friday May 31 2019

Creative prayer with Jeremiah

I fell in love with the book of Jeremiah in my early twenties. Ever since I hit puberty, I had felt that my emotions were unruly, confusing and sometimes overwhelming. I found a soul mate in Jeremiah, who (in God’s presence) cursed the day he was born and even cursed the man who brought the news of his birth to Jeremiah’s father. Jeremiah shouts at God, “Why did I come forth from the womb to see toil and sorrow, and spend my days in shame?” (Jer 20:14-18).

Talk about unruly emotions!

Jeremiah obeys his call to be God’s prophet, but he is not at all...

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