Benjamin Franklin famously declared that only death and taxes are certain. But he forgot one thing: Suffering is the third universal—as inescapable as mortality, as indifferent as the IRS.
Every major religion or philosophical system in human history has addressed the problem of suffering. Buddhism teaches acceptance and detachment—the goal is to loosen the grip of craving and desire that amplify pain, ultimately freeing the self from suffering’s hold. Secular modernity largely hands suffering to experts: therapists, physicians, pharmaceuticals, and self-optimization regimens. Suffering becomes a problem to be solved, a malfunction to be corrected. Stoicism, of the ancient and current life hack varieties, encourages cultivating indifference and yielding to fate.
But Judaism and Christianity, at their best and growing out of their shared biblical tradition, offer something none of these does: a structured, communal practice for bringing honest anguish into relationship with a God who, the psalms insist, neither despises nor ignores the cry of the afflicted.
That practice is called lament. In the psalms, lament is a structured form of prayer that follows a discernible pattern: crying out to God, complaining, requesting, remembering God’s works, and—perhaps most surprisingly—often ending in praise of God. And for much of contemporary American Christianity, which we know best and have been studying for years, it has quietly disappeared. But research we’ve been conducting suggests the costs are both deeper and wider than most churches recognize.
The current season of Lent is a time for honest reckoning—40 days of sitting with mortality, limitation, and the long ache of a world not yet whole. It is, at least in theory, the one time of year when Christianity makes room for suffering rather than rushing past it. And yet for many people, Lent passes without ever touching what is actually hardest in their lives.
That gap between what the church’s calendar invites and what its culture permits is where our research—compiled for our forthcoming book, When the Journey Hurts—begins.
When one of our research participants was asked what lament had done for her, she said something we’ve heard in different forms from many people we’ve interviewed: “I never gave myself permission to be honest with God. I think for a long time I really felt like I needed to put up a face for him because I wanted to give him what he wanted. But I had a wrong idea of what he wanted. He wants honesty from us.”
Laura was recovering from the loss of her job. She was not, by her own description, someone who lacked faith. She attended church faithfully, read her Bible, prayed regularly. But somewhere along the way, she had absorbed a message about what God required of her in suffering—and it didn’t include honest grief.
We have spent almost 10 years researching how Christians navigate suffering, interviewing nearly 100 people across ethnically and denominationally diverse communities facing cancer diagnoses and other serious hardships. We found that Laura’s experience is not unusual. It is the norm. Many Christians in our study felt that their churches had given them no language for their pain—only pressure to act in lonely, unsupported trust, to skip toward gratitude before grief had been honestly named, to treat resilient faith as a synonym for managed emotion.
But the ancient church provides a solution, one that may bring healing even beyond Christian communities.
What the research found.
Our research began from a straightforward hypothesis: Christian practices that encourage honest engagement with suffering—rather than suppressing or diminishing it, even for spiritual reasons—would be associated with better coping and greater meaning-making. We tested this by focusing on biblical lament, one of the oldest and most neglected of those practices. Data from a series of both qualitative and quantitative studies confirmed and deepened the hypothesis in ways that have direct implications for how churches care for suffering people.
In our first study, we worked with 89 Christians living with chronic pain—a population for whom spiritual resources are often especially relevant and yet frequently absent from formal treatment. Participants used a smartphone app to pray through psalms of lament daily for four weeks. At the end of the study, pain severity had decreased significantly. So had depression. Participants reported that they were more satisfied with their lives and that they had more meaning and purpose.
These are not trivial findings. Chronic pain affects approximately 1 in 5 American adults, and it is stubbornly resistant to intervention. The effect sizes we observed were clinically meaningful, not just statistically significant.
We followed this with a randomized controlled trial—the first of its kind for lament—in which 95 Christians experiencing self-reported ongoing distress from difficult life events were randomly assigned to either a six-week “Learning to Lament” program or an active control condition: a traditional Bible study on God’s promises in suffering. Both groups improved. But when we analyzed participants’ written narratives using linguistic analysis—looking specifically at words that indicate insight, causal thinking, and sense-making—the lament group showed a stronger pattern of genuine meaning-making. Lament, it appears, does something that studying encouraging Bible verses alone does not: It helps people process their suffering, not just reassure themselves about it.
Our third study asked a different question: What does it actually feel like to engage in lament? We interviewed 32 participants who had completed our app-based program. Four themes emerged consistently. People reported receiving permission—for the first time, in many cases—to be honest with God about negative emotions. They found that the psalmists’ words mirrored their own experience in ways that made them feel less alone. They were able to process emotions they had been actively avoiding. And the structure of lament—which moves through complaint toward praise—gave them a kind of relational security, the sense that honest emotion did not mean the loss of connection with God.
Twenty-one of 32 participants reported that they had grown in their relationship with God as a result. One woman put it simply: “Nothing really changed in our situation, but I saw God more. I felt his presence more and felt like I heard from him more.”
What the church withholds.
These findings prompt an uncomfortable question: If lament is this effective, why have so many Christians never encountered it?
Part of the answer is historical. As Old Testament scholar Glenn Pemberton has written, only about 4 percent of contemporary Protestant Christian worship songs reflect the kind of lament modeled in the psalms, despite the fact that nearly 40 percent of the biblical Psalter consists of laments. The hymnal of Israel was saturated with honest complaint. Ours largely is not. At some point—and this has been well-documented by theologians like Soong-Chan Rah, Todd Billings, and Walter Brueggemann—much of American Christianity internalized a triumphalist posture toward suffering: one that emphasized victory, gratitude, and praise, and grew increasingly uncomfortable with the raw petition and protest that fill the psalms.
The recovery of lament is not merely a matter of personal spiritual growth. It is a communal responsibility.
But there is something potentially more troubling underneath the historical account. When churches ask suffering people to outwardly project trust rather than speak truth, they are asking a particular kind of thing from a particular kind of person: the person for whom Sunday morning is often the loneliest hour of the week. The cancer patient. The grieving parent. The one whose life has come apart. Even if unintentionally, they are often the ones being asked to manage their presentation, to signal resilience, to express gratitude before they have had space to grieve.
When we silence the pain of our most vulnerable members, we are telling them that their full reality does not belong in the community of faith. That God prefers a curated version of them. One of our participants captured what that costs: “There has to be something more out there for people that really, really struggle, other than giving them Bible verses or saying, ‘Go to church’ or ‘Pray more,’ because when you’re in certain phases that just doesn’t do anything.”
The psalmists knew the value of inconvenient honesty. The two fundamental questions of lament, as musician and author Michael Card has written, are “God, where are you?” and “God, if you love me, then why?” Jesus prayed a lament psalm (Psalm 22) from the cross, crying “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” These are not questions the psalms treat as spiritually dangerous. They are questions that Scripture itself models—and models prolifically. Lament is not the opposite of faith. It is one of its most ancient expressions. To deprive suffering people of this practice is to withhold from them a resource that Scripture provides precisely for moments like theirs.
Complaining to God.
One clarification addresses a common concern. There is a difference between complaining to God and complaining about God. The psalms of lament do the former. They bring honest anguish, protest, even anger—directly into the presence of God. This is not the same as griping about God to others. The counterintuitive truth is that complaining to God can be an act of faith: It demonstrates that you still believe God is present, that God hears, that the relationship can bear the weight of honest expression.
One of our participants who described herself as “in a very angry place” found that lament gave her anger somewhere to go. The psalms, she said, “became a jumping off point”—praying someone else’s words until they became her own. Another, reflecting on a moment of raw emotional breakthrough during the program, said: “I just burst into tears and cried through the whole thing. But it was good, it was good, it was a good thing. It helped me to get the feelings out. And that was kind of a turning point. I could start seeing the light after I went through this.”
This is what lament does. It does not offer an explanation for suffering. It does not promise that circumstances will change. It offers something more basic: a structure for telling the truth about pain in the presence of a God who, the psalms insist, does not despise or ignore the cry of the afflicted.
What recovery looks like.
The recovery of lament is not merely a matter of personal spiritual growth. It is a communal responsibility.
Churches that want to recover lament will need to do more than add a lament psalm to the occasional worship service. They will need to create communities where honesty about suffering is welcomed structurally—where small groups and pastoral care make room for the slow, sometimes halting work of naming pain before God. Where sermons acknowledge that Psalm 88, the one lament that never arrives at praise, is also in the Bible—and that God thought it worth including.
They will also need to reckon with who is being asked to bear the cost of suppressed lament. Lament’s recovery is not just about individual wellbeing. It is about whether our communities have room for the people who are suffering the most, whether the cancer patient can walk through the church door without feeling that her fear is a spiritual liability, whether the grieving father can sit in a pew without performing a calmness he does not feel.
The data suggest that when people are given permission to be honest with God, something opens up in them—not just psychologically, but relationally. They feel closer to God. They find the suffering more bearable.
A church that recovers lament doesn’t only become healthier for its own members. It becomes a place that models something the broader culture has largely lost: the possibility that suffering can be spoken, witnessed, and held rather than simply solved. That honesty about pain is not the opposite of hope—it is, sometimes, the only road toward it. That seems like exactly the kind of witness the church is called to offer—and Lent, with its invitation to honest reckoning before resurrection, may be the best possible moment to begin.
