It’s a Beautiful Day to Yell at God

Scrolling through Pinterest a few years ago, I came across an image that has remained with me ever since. It depicts three children standing in a field beneath a massive, glowing sun, shouting upward with desperate stances and raised fists. One screams, “What the f---?” Another pleads, “Come out! We just wanna talk!” In one corner, staunch block letters read: “Face us, you coward.” And at the very top of the image, in an oversized and bolded text, are the words: “It’s a beautiful day to yell at God.”

To me, the meaning of this image feels both unsettling and familiar. 

There’s something profoundly resonant in this illustrated defiance—the instinct to cry out, to demand immediate answers from the heavens, to refuse to let God off the hook. This feels especially poignant on Good Friday. Today, we remember the suffering Christ crying out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” and today, that cry echoes through our own hearts. We are reminded of the weight of abandonment and the harsh reality that sometimes, we feel God’s silence more than His presence.

In both recollection and reckoning, we are standing today at the foot of the cross. We are watching the sky go dark and listening to the suffering Christ crying out for a God who seemingly does not answer.

In Jesus’ cry—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”—we hear the echo of every human cry in our most vulnerable moments of abandonment and despair, a solidarity that reaches across time and space, joining us in our deepest struggles as we scream out to God, “Where the hell are you?”

That’s the scandal of Good Friday: not that God is truly absent in suffering, but that God is found inside it. 

Like me, you might find yourself standing in the same field as the one in the image I found on Pinterest—fists clenched and shouting into a deafening silence that feels an awful lot like abandonment. 

Relief is not immediate.

Clarity is not promised.

But what we do know is that we worship a God who meets us there.

Good Friday is a day of raw, unrelenting silence. The bare altar and omission of the Liturgy of the Eucharist during Mass makes the seeming absence of God even more palpable. There’s no triumphant resurrection to speak of yet. In this emptiness, the cry of “It’s a beautiful day to yell at God” takes on new meaning. We shout into the void for hope, resolution, and resurrection as we’re left with the raw, unvarnished reality of our pain. Today, God’s silence feels deafening, but it’s in that silence that we’re reminded of what it means to follow a God who knows exactly what it’s like to feel forsaken.