How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I bear pain in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all day long? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me? Consider and answer me, O Lord my God! Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death, and my enemy will say, “I have prevailed”; my foes will rejoice because I am shaken. But I trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord because he has dealt bountifully with me. (Psalm 13) There is a torrent of pain and suffering constantly battering our senses and burdening our hearts. It’s in our lives, it’s in our world. We can’t engage meaningfully with every evil and ill we face though—it would flood over us, overwhelming us again and again. Often it does, in fact.

When city planners of the past decades would come across the not unrelated problem of unruly waters that would flow their banks every spring. They solved it by burying it. That was the case for the Chedoke Creek that flows underground near (or under?) our church’s property. The landscape has been flattened and made useful, but no one sees or hears the waters of that creek anymore until they spill over the escarpment in the Chedoke waterfall, and then just as quickly as they appeared much of them are gone again into another culvert.

Slowly we come into awareness though, of the fact that we human folk are somehow healthier when graced by the sound, sight, and even touch of live, running water, no matter how unruly it may, at times, be. And not only us, but the ecosystem is likewise healthier when creeks, streams, and swamps are left alone to clean the water and provide habitat for a myriad of other creatures of God’s Creation. Nothing lives or is brought life though when a creek is banished to a culvert and its once carved creek-bed is flattened to pavement.

So it is with our emotional world and our experience of grief and suffering. Like so many practical man vs. nature solutions of the decades past, we’ve often buried this river of hurt, painting on smiles if necessary.

But when we don’t face the suffering we experience, it doesn’t get the chance to drive us to the ultimate questions of life, death, and God that are important to ask. Questions like, “Is God really in control?” “Is He really present, or has He forgotten us?” To look at suffering in the light of the day is to grapple with the foundations of our faith and to cry out like David, “How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?”

If we don’t confront suffering—we implicitly deny the hope offered by Christ in the face of it. On the other hand, if we accept suffering without question, we implicitly deny the unacceptable reality of the sin and evil in our world that Jesus came to save us from. Both are ways of shunting our suffering underground.

So it’s important to daylight the river of human suffering—our suffering—to look it in the face and turn it into prayer before God. That’s lament: prayers, questions, and cries that arise when deep suffering and deep faith meet, offered to the God whose love never fails.

That is what David does in Psalm 13. And it is only in this honest place of wrestling with both our sufferings and our faith that we discover the deep places where the salvation we have in Jesus really meets the deep pain, suffering, sin, and evil of our lives. And that: being saved out of those places by the gracious action of God again and again—that is what can make our hearts to sing.