Suffering and Songs of Lament
Adapted from How to Remember: Forgotten Pathways to An Authentic Faith by Andrew Osenga. (©2025) Published by Moody Publishers. Used with permission.
Many years ago, I spent some time in India, traveling to various cities, recording local musicians, and writing songs based on the stories I was encountering. It was a wild and life-changing trip, due both to the beauty of the nation and its music, and also its overwhelming oppression and poverty.
Almost everywhere you looked, the streets were lined with cardboard houses and homeless children, victims of the cruel caste system. The people were beautiful, but the sight was heartbreaking, the filth overwhelming, and the noise constant. Nothing can prepare you for sleepless nights in a five-star hotel overlooking a slum where children are playing and living in a pile of trash outside your window.
At one point during our trip, Colin Powell (at that time the US Secretary of State) was coming to Mumbai for a visit. All of a sudden, certain streets were eerily quiet. Crisp and beautiful. Not a beggar to be seen.
All along the path from the airport to the place where Powell would be staying, to the palace he’d be visiting, giant white walls had been erected. The roads had been cleaned and fresh grass laid down, so that the general’s experience of India would be one of serene beauty, while on the other side of the walls lived the heaving throngs of chaos that marked the familiar Indian streets.
My hunch is that General Powell was not fooled by the ruse. Surely, his Indian escorts weren’t either, though maybe, for a minute, looking down those clean, safe streets, they might almost wish they could be.
If so, I would understand. I know that feeling.
My own life has been deeply marked by suffering, and there are many ways I’ve tried to put up my own white walls and keep myself from the truth of my own pain and sadness.
But those walls in India didn’t address the oppression of the caste system or feed the hungry children; they just hid them from view. Just as hiding from my own loneliness or sadness only made me more miserable and unable to ask anyone for help. It was a spiral that could have had no end, were it not for the kindness of God, caring for me through the loving, pursuing friendships of my community (often when I was not the most eager recipient).
There are things we deeply long for that we may never have. Partners. Children. Career. We’ve lost family and friends too soon. We are plagued by chronic pain, disease, crushing financial burdens, and the hidden worlds of abuse and addiction. The broken relationships that refuse to heal, no matter what we do.
Suffering is by no means the only prerequisite of being human, but it is surely one of them.
For most of human history, this was an undeniable fact. A general understanding of life. However, our culture has these unique blessings—painkillers, cellphones, air conditioning, grocery stores, airplanes—which are also in a strange way curses, in that they put cushioning barriers between us and the raw reality of being human. They allow us to live an illusion that suffering is abnormal and out of the ordinary.
Have you felt this mentality even creep into our Sunday morning songs at times? This unstated idea is that because God cares about our lives, they should also be painless. I know I have. It sets us up for constant disillusionment, doesn’t it?
Yet I continue to be amazed by this: That Jesus became human is the most shocking thing about Christianity. And that He did not come as a conqueror or a king, but as a helpless child, who would go on to live as a refugee and a homeless man before being ultimately abandoned and tortured to death.
In fact, in the Bible, we’re introduced to Him like this:
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. (Isa. 53:2–3)
Talk about a first impression. I’ll be honest, there are days when it can be a little hard to be
friends with people who seem like they’ve had a totally easy ride, whether or not this is true. I’m both jealous and confident that they couldn’t really understand my life and the problems I’ve had.
Then other times you meet someone, and you know that they just “get it.” You’re able to connect and trust each other because you’ve both been through similar challenges.
This is where Christ meets us—in humility, eye to eye. “A man of sorrows,” as some versions of Scripture call Him, who intentionally endured great pain to sit with us when we have no choice left but to be honest about what’s really going on.
Our pain is not scary for Jesus. It is not unwelcome or unholy. It is the most sacred and natural way to come before God.
My friends, to not come honestly to God is to deny our humanity, and to deny His sacrificial act of meeting us there. The good news of Jesus is that He came for the broken and the sick. That was the whole point, after all.
And so, we bring our pain before Him, together as a church, in song. We cry out in our loss, grief, and anguish. Even our anger. We call these songs “laments.”
One of the most famous songs of lament handed down within the past few generations is the hymn “It Is Well,” written after a two-year span in which its author, Horatio Spafford, lost his four year-old son to scarlet fever, his successful real estate business to the Great Chicago Fire, and then his four other children, all daughters, in a shipwreck.
When peace like a river attendeth my way, when sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say, “It is well, it is well, with my soul.
—“IT IS WELL WITH MY SOUL,” HORATIO SPAFFORD, 1873
You would think the song ends there, like the stages of grief, in acceptance, but no, the story isn’t over. The next four verses actually move forward into themes of sin, redemption, and heaven. To sing of suffering does not mean you have to wallow in it and stay there forever. It simply means you are honest about where you are at the moment.
In some mysterious way, crying out to God, “Why have you abandoned me?!” has been for many the pathway to hope, and even, as impossible as it may seem, to joy.
A lot of the pain in my life is not mine alone, and I don’t need to tell stories that aren’t mine to tell, but I can tell you this: The only reason I still have a relationship with Jesus is that He was a man of suffering, well acquainted with grief.
Because I am too.