A Prayer for Those Feeling Fragile
The most common type of song in the Psalms is not praise, or even thanks, but lament.
While that may seem strange to us at first, it begins to make more sense when we pause to think about our lives in this fallen age and the kind of prayers we pray. Living in this age, ravaged in various measures by sin, with fears within and fightings without (2 Corinthians 7:5), we are not always poised to offer praise and thanks. Often we find ourselves — if not most often — in the posture of lament, pleading with God to help, to heal, to remedy, to rescue.
The glory of psalms of praise is that God deserves our praise at all times, regardless of our circumstances, whether all feels right in our little worlds or not. The glory in psalms of thanks is that God, our Savior, has acted on our behalf. The glory in laments is that despite our pain and difficulty, and struggle and doubts, we still turn Godward. Our faith is being tested, and in the very act of turning to our Lord, rather than elsewhere, there is hope. In lament is often where we find him to be our greatest Treasure.
When We’re Languishing
As glorious as praise and thanks are, it is fitting in this age that the book of Psalms contains more laments — what Walter Bruggemann calls “psalms of disorientation” — than any other type of psalm, because we are, in truth, so often disoriented.
“Spiritual sanity is restored in the very act of addressing God and rehearsing what he has promised.”
Take Psalm 6, for instance. Hard circumstances in David’s life (whether related to his son Absalom’s rebellion or not, we do not know) have led him to see his sin, and to cry out to God for rescue. Some consider this to be the first of six “penitential psalms” (Psalms 32, 38, 51, 130, and 143), which focus on repentance. But David also has been sinned against, and gravely. So his pain and confusion in Psalm 6 are great. And in such a whirlwind of disorientation, God doesn’t tell him, and us, to just grit our teeth, put on a smile, and sing a happy song. God invites us, as Aslan says to Shasta in The Horse and His Boy, “Tell me all your sorrows.”
God sees and knows our confusion, and doesn’t sweep it under the rug, but acknowledges it with the most common type of psalm in his inspired songbook. He calls us to more than just rehearsing our pain, though. David does cry out in his despair in the psalm’s first seven verses — such pleading with God is typical of laments. But then the beloved king changes his key with a surprising burst of confidence in the final three (verses 8–10). Ending on a resounding note of confidence (in God) is also typical in laments.
God means for us to move beyond the disorientation that prompted our lament. In fact, God designed the very nature of biblical lament to be a channel of his grace to help us along the path to spiritual reorientation.
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