You don’t have to be fine before God. Discover how lament can support emotional and spiritual healing after abortion.
After abortion, you may be carrying grief, regret, anger, guilt, shame, confusion, or questions that are hard to say out loud. And yet, life keeps moving. You go to work, take care of the people around you, show up at church, pray the familiar prayers, and probably answer “How are you?” with the standard “I’m fine.”
Sometimes that same instinct to hide what you’re feeling can follow you into prayer.
You may wonder whether your emotions are too much, whether you shouldn’t bring them before God. Maybe you’re angry about circumstances that led to your abortion(s), angry with other people, or even angry with God. Maybe you feel ashamed, guilty, or confused. Maybe you think God can’t forgive you. Or maybe you believe God loves and forgives you, yet at the same time you feel far away from Him.
You don’t have to be fine before God.
Scripture shows us that God invites us to come close, pour out our hearts, and speak honestly with Him. His love and mercy give you room to bring the parts of your story that still hurt, the questions you carry, and the feelings you may barely know how to put into words.
One of the ways Scripture teaches us to pray from that place of pain and hard emotions is through lament.
What Is Lament After Abortion?
Lament after abortion is prayer that gives voice to pain, grief, anger, questions, or longing and brings them directly to God. You tell Him what is happening in your heart, ask Him to hear and help you, and reach toward what you know—or long to believe—about His love, mercy, and presence.
Spiritual lament can include sorrow, anger, fear, confusion, disappointment, loneliness, and even the feeling that God is silent or distant. These prayers can be deeply emotional because they come from real experiences of loss and distress.
Pastor and theologian Glenn Packiam calls lament “an appeal to God based on confidence in His character.” Even when the words are full of pain, the prayer is turned toward God. You are asking Him to hear you, stay near, and act.
Packiam also calls lament “a prayer in the meantime.” After abortion, there can be many “meantime” places: when you’re hurting and don’t yet know what healing might look like, when you’ve started healing and are working through painful emotions, or when another layer surfaces much later. Lament can give you words for whatever place you’re in today.
Being Real With God Is Part of the Relationship
Bringing your hardest feelings into prayer may feel unfamiliar or uncomfortable. You may find yourself waiting until you’ve made sense of what you’re feeling or figured out what you think you’re supposed to say.
Yet, relationship with God grows through honesty.
The writers of the Psalms bring God their fear, anguish, anger, longing, disappointment, and questions. Packiam points out that the lament itself says something about the relationship between the writer and God: they keep talking to God. They cry out to Him because they believe He hears them and because the relationship matters.
Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann describes lament as part of a real relationship with God—one in which the person praying has a genuine voice. Prayer can hold praise and gratitude, along with pain, questions, disappointment, and protest. A real relationship with God has room for a real conversation.
After abortion, your thoughts and feelings about God can become tangled up with everything else you’re carrying. You may believe in His mercy and struggle to receive that mercy for yourself. You may long to feel close to Him and wonder whether your abortion(s) created distance between you. Questions about where God was in what happened—or why grief or regret still surfaces—may also become part of your prayer.
Lament gives you a place to bring those questions and feelings into your relationship with God.
Psychologists Bonnie Poon Zahl and Nicholas Gibson studied something many Christians may recognize: what we know about God in our heads doesn’t always match how we experience Him in our hearts. People in their study described God more positively when talking about what they believed He should be like than when describing what He actually felt like to them.
That gap may sound familiar: “I believe God is merciful, and I’m having trouble feeling His mercy toward me.” Or, “I believe God is close, and I feel alone.” Lament lets you bring your beliefs, your emotions, and the distance between them into the same conversation with God.
Lament in Psalms & Job
Scripture gives us striking examples of how honestly people have spoken with God from places of pain. The reasons for lament are just as varied, including bringing God physical pain, loss, broken relationships, injustice, disappointment, and the sense that God is silent or far away. Psychologist M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall points out that “nothing is off limits” when people bring their suffering to God.
In Psalm 13, David asks “How long?” again and again. He feels forgotten, carries sorrow day after day, and asks God to look at him and answer. By the end, he reaches toward trust in God’s mercy. The grief, the request, and the trust are all parts of the same prayer.
That turn toward trust is common in psalms of lament. Hall notes that Scripture often doesn’t tell us what changed—or whether the painful circumstances had changed at all. As the person cries out to God, they may also remember who He is—His faithfulness, mercy, power, and the ways He has acted before, both in Scripture and in their own lives. That remembering can begin to turn the prayer toward renewed trust in Him.
Psalm 42 gives words to spiritual longing. The writer describes tears, a downcast soul, and a deep thirst for God. He also asks God why He seems to have forgotten him. Through that distress, he keeps remembering God and reaching toward hope.
Psalm 88 is one of the starkest examples of lament. The writer calls God “the God of my salvation,” asks Him to hear, describes loneliness and darkness, and keeps crying out to Him. The psalm closes while that darkness is still present. It shows us that a lament doesn’t have to reach an emotional resolution in one prayer. You can come back to God tomorrow, or whenever you have more to say.
The whole book of Job gives us an even longer picture of lament. In Job 7, after describing troubled, sleepless nights, Job says he will speak from the anguish of his spirit. From there, he brings God his hardest questions. Throughout the book, Job brings grief, protest, confusion, and anguish into his continuing engagement with God.
Together, these passages show how different lament can sound. One prayer reaches toward trust, another ends in darkness, and Job keeps asking painful questions. Through each of them runs the same thread: turning toward God with what is real.
How Lament Can Support Healing After Abortion
Putting painful experiences into words may support emotional healing, as well as spiritual growth. Hall has studied lament and the ways people make meaning of painful experiences in their relationship with God.
In one small study, Christians going through difficult circumstances practiced lament regularly for four weeks. Many said lament helped them process their emotions, be more honest with God, and experience greater closeness with Him.
Lament can give painful emotions somewhere to go. You can name what you’re carrying, hear yourself put it into words, and bring it into a relationship that matters deeply to you.
You may genuinely believe God forgives me. God is with me. I can trust Him. Your emotions may need more time to work through grief, anger, guilt, shame, or other difficult feelings and experiences. Or you may find yourself wondering, Does God still love me? Lament creates room to bring your questions and emotions into God’s presence as you process what you’re carrying.
Many people may initially feel uncomfortable being this emotionally honest with God. They may worry that what they’re really thinking or feeling means their faith isn’t strong enough, or that they are spiritually or emotionally weak, ungrateful, or too vulnerable. Yet Scripture repeatedly shows people bringing these deeply human experiences into prayer. Fr. Michael Guinan OFM writes: “When we hurt physically, we cry out in pain. When we hurt religiously, we cry out in lament.”
Lament makes room for you to come to God as you are today, with whatever emotions and questions you actually have.
How to Write a Prayer of Lament After Abortion
Fr. Shawn Monahan, a member of Support After Abortion’s Board of Directors, uses and recommends writing a personal psalm as an exercise in abortion healing retreats and groups. The practice gives people an opportunity to put into words what they’re carrying and speak those words directly to God.
Some of the psalms written during these experiences show how personal that prayer can become.
One participant wrote:
“Why are you silent? … Yet, despite the feelings of being alone, somehow, I know you are here.”
Another participant described feeling that the closeness they once experienced with God had become a “great gap” and wrote:
“I LONG for you. I NEED you.”
Each person’s psalm is deeply personal. Fr. Shawn uses this practice as one way to help people connect what they are carrying emotionally with their relationship with God.
Across Scripture and different approaches to writing laments, several common parts appear.
Here’s a simple pattern you can use to write your own prayer of lament:
- Speak to God. Begin by addressing God in whatever way feels natural to you.
- Tell Him what hurts. Write honestly about what feels painful, confusing, unresolved, or hard to carry. Let the words come without editing them into what you think a prayer should sound like.
- Ask for what you need. Tell God what you want or need from Him right now. Your request may be practical, emotional, spiritual, or simply a plea for Him to hear you.
- Reach toward what you know of God or what you long for. You might name something you believe about God, remember a time you experienced His love or faithfulness, express a hope, or simply tell Him what you long to be able to trust.
These are prompts to help you begin. Your prayer may spend more time in one part, return to another, or end wherever you honestly are.
Let your psalm sound like you. It can be a few sentences or several paragraphs, carefully written or poured onto the page all at once. The goal is simply to give honest words to what is in your heart and bring them to God.
You Don’t Have to Heal Alone
Writing a prayer of lament can give you one way to bring what you’re carrying honestly before God. You may also want someone to walk alongside you as you work through emotional or spiritual impacts that you may be experiencing after abortion.
Our After Abortion Line offers free, anonymous support. Call or text 844-289-HOPE (4673), email us, or connect online at supportafterabortion.com. We’ll listen with compassion, and we can help you find support that fits your preferences, including self-guided, one-on-one, or group support; secular or religious; virtual or in-person.
Support After Abortion also offers Keys to Hope and Healing After Abortion for women and men, a secular healing resource that can be used independently, one-on-one, or in groups. Men who want a Christian resource can use Finding Solid Ground: A Man’s Guide to Healing After Abortion, which brings faith, God’s love, and mercy into the healing process.
A new Christian resource for women, Keys to Hope and Healing After Abortion for Women: With God’s Love & Mercy, will be available soon. Join our mailing list to be notified when it’s available.
Lament After Abortion: A Prayer for the Meantime
Your “meantime” may begin while you’re hurting after abortion and aren’t sure where healing begins. You may be actively working through what you’ve been carrying. Years later, a relationship change, pregnancy, birth of a child or grandchild, anniversary, loss, or another season of life may bring another layer to the surface. Healing can continue to unfold as your life and perspective change.
Lament can meet you in each of those places. It gives you a way to speak honestly to God as you heal, ask for what you need, and keep returning to His love and mercy when your feelings are complicated or your questions remain.
Packiam also points out that over time, learning to bring your own pain honestly before God may help you feel more comfortable sitting with someone else in theirs.
Wherever you are in your healing, you can begin with what is true in your heart today. Lament is a prayer in the meantime—a way to keep bringing your real heart to God as healing unfolds, grounded in the assurance of His love, His mercy, and His presence with you.
FAQ
What is lament after abortion?
Lament is an honest form of prayer that brings grief, anger, guilt, questions, longing, or other painful emotions directly to God.
Can I be angry with God after abortion?
Scripture includes many prayers in which people bring anger, confusion, disappointment, and difficult questions directly to God. Lament gives those feelings a place within prayer rather than requiring you to hide them.
How do I pray when I am struggling after abortion?
You can begin simply: speak to God, tell Him honestly what hurts, ask for what you need, and reach toward what you know—or long to believe—about His love, mercy, and presence.
© Support After Abortion
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