Our culture wants you to be happy. It rewards those who smile through the pain, who pretend everything’s fine, who compartmentalize grief and get on with life. But everything’s not fine. And God does not expect us to pretend it is. He wants all of us–including our pain.

Perhaps nowhere in Scripture do we get as full a picture of the heights and depths of the human experience as in the Psalms. The outpourings of emotion never shy away from the darkest moments of life, and yet they also point toward the light–toward the God in whom we place our hope.

Inspired by Psalm 37, Voices of Lament is a powerful collection of reflections from Christian Women of Color on themes of injustice, heartache, and deep suffering. Their essays, prayers, poems, and liturgies lay bare the experiences of the oppressed even as they draw us into deeper intimacy with God and a more fulsome understanding of each other.

For anyone who longs to better express and understand the beauty of lament held in holy tension with hope and love, this extraordinary collection presents both well-known and new voices from various ethnic and people groups and different generations, putting God’s faithfulness on full and glorious display.