Shane Ash

A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting across from a pastor I had only briefly met before. We were sharing our stories, slowly revealing more as we recognized the similarity of our paths. Mid-sentence, he looked at me and abruptly asked, “You seem sad. Are you sad?”

The question caught me off guard. It wasn’t one I was prepared to answer in the moment. It wasn’t even a reality I had consciously considered. But it landed with striking clarity…like a key turning a lock I didn’t know existed.

Since then, I’ve been sitting with it. Examining it. Letting it speak.

And yes, I am sad.

There is a deep sadness that resides just beneath the surface of my life. It’s not circumstantial. Not a passing disappointment. It’s broader and deeper…a sadness of the soul. I recognize now that it’s actually been with me for a long time, patiently waiting to be named.

And in reflection, I’ve come to believe this sadness is not something to fix or rush through. It’s something to listen to, to follow, and to let guide.

This kind of sadness is not a sign of despair. It’s a sign of awareness…an awakening to the pain in the air around me. A waking up to the violence embedded in our everyday systems. Waking up to the blasphemy of the Church through its all-too-common disgust of the other and worship of power. Waking up to my own sense of dislocation—from community, belonging, family, and perhaps from calling.

Walter Brueggemann calls this awakening part of the work of prophetic imagination—the work of perceiving and nurturing an alternative consciousness in contrast to the royal consciousness of dominant culture. The starting point of that alternative consciousness, he writes, is lament. And lament can show up in many forms…anger can be a holy and fitting part of lament…and so is sadness.

I am not talking about a private sadness. It is not mere emotional reaction. It is the outcome of increasing awareness and insight…eyes that can no longer just look away from a world that incentivizes non-empathy…where economic engines depend on our distraction, detachment, and denial…where we are numb to the suffering of the poor, actively denying the degradation of the planet and quality of life, medicated by our constant consumption, and desensitized to our racism and supremacy cloaked in religious language.

Everything around us is connected. And everything, it seems, is in pain.

Those who position themselves on the Right are often driven by grievance and anger. The Left by superiority and cynicism. Both are led by fear and addicted to power. Religious conservatives frame themselves as persecuted victims. Religious liberals flinch at personal conviction.

Edit Note: For sure these are broad characterizations that don’t capture the full depth or diversity within either tradition. The real grief here is not about “liberal” or “conservative” Christianity per se, but how both ends—when shaped more by fear and power than love—become reactive opposites within the same broken system. The pain is amplified when these extremes mirror one another, each claiming moral or interpretive high ground all while sustaining the royal consciousness machinery that harms us all.

All of us are, in one way or another, caught in the machinery of a failed system.

Yes, I am sad that conservative Christians are so terrified of a radically hospitable God—one who welcomes the outcast, the queer, the migrant, the heretic—while being comforted by authoritarian political power and a god fashioned in their own image. The fear of losing control, of ceding certainty and superiority, has driven them into the arms of strongmen and systems that promise safety at the cost of compassion and grace.

And I am sad that liberal Christians are so afraid of a radically free God—one who refuses to be domesticated by ideology or reduced to social performance—while being comforted by a law-based moralism often disguised as justice. A justice that often resembles judgment of judgment…a righteousness that trades one purity code for another. 

There is a strange cultural clinging to the comfort of causes without examining the community outcomes, the security of being on the “right side,” while fearing the wildness of grace…and the Spirit who blows where She will. It is still control and power—just dressed in different robes.

Yes, I am sad that the language of faith—of resurrection, healing, liberation, and beloved community—has been co-opted by nationalism on the Right, and by a sanitized vocal activism on the Left. We speak of gospel healing, but we have privatized it. We reduced it to a personal prayer project, a self-care plan, or an inner-peace process, rather than courageous, communal, kingdom work. 

Of course, gospel healing requires not just inner experience, but social imagination. Not just personal peace, but public reckoning. It requires truth-telling. And therefore, lament in its many forms. And the uncomfortable work of letting go of the gods we’ve made in our own image—whether dressed in patriotism or progressivism—and returning to the wild, untamable, boundary-breaking God who is compassionate Host, great Liberator, and wooing Guide. 

Just days ago, in a strangely fitting metaphor, a massive container ship lost control and ran aground—astonishingly close to a seaside home in Norway. The images are surreal: the global machinery of consumption, immobilized in shallow water, absurdly close to destroying a peaceful home. And the homeowner? According to the story…was asleep through it all, completely unaware.

It’s a telling image. What if the pain of the planet, the suffering of the marginalized, and the fracturing of the Church have already run aground—and we are still sleeping? Numb participants. Merely curious bystanders.

In this light, sadness is not weakness, a burden, or something to get over. It is the beginning of resistance. It is the refusal to stay asleep, or at least, it’s enough of a disturbance to wake us up.

Brueggemann reminds us that lament is always the first act of resistance and renewal. And sadness, then, need not be dismissed. It is an active invitation. It is the inner honesty of lament. To be attuned to the groaning of nature and the pain of our neighbor is to share in the grieving heart of God. To be sad is to pray—not with tidy words, but with tears, with silence, with shared suffering.

My faith tells me that sadness is not the end. It is a required threshold. A liminal space. The breaking open of something new. Sadness prepares the ground for hope…not the shallow waters of sentimental faith, but a motivating-hope born amid felt pain, soaked in love, and moved by the Spirit.

So yes, I am sad. And my sadness is my prayer.