Dear Faith Family,
I shared this with my Gospel Community earlier this week and thought it might encourage others as well. Now, halfway through another week continuing to hope for an end to our troubles, our inconveniences, and our wavering moods with little end in sight, we might find that our prayers are more pitiful than powerful. Maybe you can identify, as I can, with the psalmist in Psalm 77, whose prayer starts as a pity-party directed towards God, and a dramatic one at that!
I yell out to my God, I yell with all my might,
I yell at the top of my lungs. He listens. I found myself in trouble and went looking for my Lord;
my life was an open wound that wouldn't heal.
When friends said, 'Everything will turn out all right,'
I didn't believe a word they said.
I remember God--and shake my head.
I bow my head--then wring my hands.
I'm awake all night--not a wink of sleep;
I can't even say what's bothering me.
I go over the days one by one,
I ponder the years gone by.
I strum my lute all through the night,
wondering how to get my life together. Will the Lord walk off and leave us for good?
Will he ever smile again?
Is his love worn threadbare?
Has his salvation promise burned out?
Has God forgotten his manners?
Has he angrily stalked off and left us?
'Just my luck,' I said, 'The High God goes out of business
just the moment I need him.'
The last line is my favorite! I have thought those words, though hardly had the courage to pray them! Have your prayers sounded like any or all of the psalmist's? Or maybe your feelings and thoughts, whether you prayed them or not?
Well, if you are like me, you probably feel bad about praying such things. You don't like self-pity and think it is both useless and even wrong to dwell in this crippling, distorting activity. And you'd be right. Self-pity is a dead-end, and yet our psalms don't forbid self-pity, at least in the presence of our Father.
Reread the second line, "I yell at the top of my lungs. He listens." The psalmist's pity-party is directed in the right direction; it's directed towards God, who is listening. And you know what happens to the psalmist, and what happens more often than not in my own prayed pity-parties, the prayer ends far from where it started. Here is the rest of Psalm 77,
Once again I'll go over what God has done,
lay out on the table the ancient wonders;
I'll ponder all the things you've accomplished,
and give a long, loving look at your acts. O God! Your way is holy!
No god is great like God!
You're the God who makes things happen;
you showed everyone what you can do--
You pulled your people out of the worst kind of trouble,
rescued the children of Jacob and Joseph. Ocean saw you in action, God,
saw you and trembled with fear;
Deep Ocean was scared to death.
Clouds belched buckets of rain, Sky exploded with thunder, your arrows flashing this way and that.
From Whirlwind came your thundering voice,
Lighting exposed the world,
Earth reeled and rocked.
You strode right through Ocean,
walked straight through roaring Ocean,
but nobody saw your footprints, saw you come and go. You led your people like a flock of sheep,
by the hand of Moses and Aaron.
Something happened to the psalmist in the middle of his pity-party with God; his focused changed. But the amazing thing to me, the thing that keeps me praying through my self-pity, is that there is nothing other than the listening God's presence that seemed to reorient the psalmist. He didn't will his change of attitude. He didn't argue himself into a different focus. He didn't even respond to a self or Spirit rebuke. The prayer simply turns on a dime. One minute he is wallowing in his self-pity (vs.10), and the next (vs. 11) he is worshiping. There is nothing to account for such a change but that his prayer was truly prayer: a response to the living, intimate God who listens.
Eugene Peterson once said, "Any place is the right place to begin to pray. But we mustn't be afraid of ending up someplace quite different from where we start." So, my encouragement for us this week is to keep praying. And, if your prayer starts like Psalm 77, keep praying to our Father who listens, until your prayer turns too.