Prayers More Gritty than Benign

In some ways, I’m rediscovering the Psalms. Now I’m wondering why for so long I overlooked them in my daily reading and praying. I knew better than to assume, as someone once put it, that they are mostly mild “benign poems about sheep,” but more like, as Eugene Peterson wrote, “earthy and rough,” just right for sorting through life’s sometimes gritty, seemingly graceless moments. Still, I found myself turning elsewhere for inspiration.

But one morning I was troubled, praying for a friend in ministry accused unjustly of some dark missteps. I found myself looking up Psalm 4, recalling a writer I much admire singing its praises. And I realized that, while I could pray for my hurting friend in all kinds of ways, this Psalm had an honesty and urgency that I needed in order to frame my requests for him. I found myself assuming the Psalm’s voice, mouthing prayers on my friend’s behalf:

Answer me when I call to you,

my righteous God.

Give me relief from my distress;

have mercy on me and hear my prayer. (NIV)

Sometimes we think we have to start from scratch when approaching God. That we have to offer prayers that are somehow both impromptu and polished.

But something good awaits when we press our prayers into the molding shape of the Psalmists’ heartfelt record of their encounters. They help us turn our swirling emotions into profound petitions, our tangled worries into steady requests.

“The child learns to speak because his father speaks to him,” wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer about the Psalms. Bonhoeffer, himself already articulate even in times of struggle, knew how much we all need God’s own guidance when we are casting about to express our overflowing or heartrending sentiments. “By means of the speech of his Father in heaven,” Bonhoeffer continued, God’s children “learn to speak to him. Repeating God’s words after him, we begin to pray to him.”

As I turn to God this morning, as any of us bring along to a heavenly Father the hurts and joys and sadnesses of our friends, I’m getting more enthusiasm for enlisting the resources for prayer ready and at hand.

Photo by Anthony Burden via Unsplash.com.