Jonalyn Fincher has posted a two-part interview on her blog. She's a sweetheart, one of those people I wish lived close by so we could just chat over coffee. We met at the Calvin Festival on Faith & Writing two years ago (which I highly recommend -- I'm planning to go back this year). She's also the author of Ruby Slippers: How the Soul of a Woman Brings Her Home. Here she is with her little Welsh Corgi named Lady Jane.
I know that you live with the daily labor of living with Lyme’s disease alongside the work of continuing your writing and daily blog. How have you learned to embrace lament and honest painful expression within the often stifling milieu of sunshin-ey, smiley Christianity? As a woman what gives you courage to be a woman of lament?
Living with Lyme disease, which means I deal with constant exhaustion, pushed me to depths I didn’t know existed. I could no longer pretend to be okay, I simply wasn’t. It took living through that experience for me to begin to understand lament, and I still think I have a lot to learn about how to process it and how it should be experienced. I’m comforted by the fact that there’s a long tradition of lament in Christianity, that David and the prophets felt no need to be smiley. I was struggling the other day, wavering between accusing God and trusting him, and I thought, “I wonder if that qualifies me to be a psalmist?” (...)
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