My mom called this morning to say that there had been a tragedy in my nephew’s dorm at his university in Indiana. Just a few floors below him, in the very same building, a student had stabbed his roommate to death. The student who committed the crime had called 911 and turned himself in. My nephew was safe, but chills ran down my spine and a heaviness weighed my heart down.

The victim was a 20-year-old student of Indian descent. He had made the National Merit Scholarship program a few years ago. This was someone with an undeniably bright, promising future. A future crushed in a gruesome act of violence.

The police chief in the town has called the incident “unprovoked and senseless.”

That word resonated with me: Senseless.

So many things I’ve come upon this week seem to be exactly that — senseless.

I won’t go into the details of the dreadful diagnoses, heartaches, and losses involving friends and colleagues in the last month. I don’t need to go into the details because I know you’re intimately familiar with suffering that seems senseless and arbitrary, almost absurd.

Why does God allow suffering in this world?

Why does He not do something to stop the madness???

Why do bad things happen to good people??

I could offer you some answers.

I could point you to the truth that we live in a broken world, fractured by sin, and say that suffering is an inevitable consequence of our fallen nature.

I could tell you that if God took away suffering caused by humans, He would also be taking away free will, which would essentially turn us into robots.

I could say that God uses suffering to train us and grow us and mold us into conformity with His Son.

I could quote Scripture and say that all things will ultimately work out for our good and His glory.

I could remind you that this is not our home and that our eyes need to be fixed on eternity.

I believe those statements are true.

But, sometimes, we don’t need to make sense of the senseless. Sometimes, it’s okay to simply pour out our pain before Him, to lay bare our bewilderment.

We can lament. We can cry. We can grieve. We can be real with God.

This morning, as I read Psalm 61, these words jumped out at me:

“Hear my cry, O God;

listen to my prayer.

From the ends of the earth I call to you,

I call as my heart grows faint.”

David is in the wilderness, being chased down by a powerful and insane king. And in the midst of the senselessness of his situation, he simply acknowledges before God that he is overwhelmed. Like me, and maybe like you, he says: “God, it’s all too much. My heart can’t handle it anymore. The darkness is suffocating.” Here was a man who had killed lions and bears with his hands and defeated a giant with a stone acknowledging that his heart was growing faint.

But even in his lament, David looks up. And when he does, he cries out: “Lead me to the rock that is higher than I.” David knows he can’t claw his way out of this valley of pain by himself. So he says with complete vulnerability: “I can’t on my own. So lead me, Lord, out of this pit of despair and place my feet on a rock that is higher than I.”

Perhaps, we don’t always need to make sense of the senseless. Perhaps, we just need to pour out our pain before Him.

In crying out to the Man of Sorrows, to the One familiar with suffering and acquainted with grief, we know that we are not alone. We sense that even in the midst of the senseless of it all, He is with us, and He leads us to Himself, the Rock that was broken for those living in brokenness.

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