Dispatch Faith: The World Needs to Recover True Lament. Christianity Can Teach It., by Kelly M. Kapic (Covenant College), M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall (Biola University) & Jason McMartin (Biola University) (Co-Authors, When the Journey Hurts: Finding Meaning in Suffering for Heart, Mind, and Soul (2026)):
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.” …
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.
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