Three Excerpts from My Forthcoming Book:
Praying the Scripture: Learning to Pray the Psalms
from Chapter 15:
Psalm 88: The Prayer God Kept
I want to stay with Psalm 88 a little longer, because I think it is one of the most important psalms in the book for anyone who has ever felt that prayer was beyond them.
Try to imagine this with me. The most loving, most powerful, most wise being in the universe hears your cries for help, for rescue, for release, for comfort, for direction. He knows what you are up against and who is up against you. He knows the wisest course of action. He is aware of every pressure and challenge in your life. He knows the details of your disappointments and the heights of your hopes. He hears it all — and He is disposed to act.
Now read Psalm 88 again with that in mind. The psalmist’s one request is not to be rescued. It is to be heard. And the fact that this prayer was preserved — written down, passed on through generations, included in the inspired collection that would become the Bible — means that it was heard. God kept it. God thought it worth keeping.
That is extraordinary. It means that even the prayer that feels like it is going nowhere is always going somewhere. Even the cry that feels like it disappears into silence is being received by a God who hears desire before it becomes language. . . .
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A Personal Story: When I Had No Words
There was a season in my life when grief and confusion collided. I would sit with my Bible open, wanting to pray, but nothing came. My mind was blank. My heart was heavy. My emotions were tangled beyond anything I could sort through in a morning.
And that morning, I opened to Psalm 130:
“I wait for the LORD, my soul waits,
and in his word I hope.” (Psalm 130:5, ESV)
That was all I could do. Wait. Hope. Sit in silence.
I prayed, “Lord, I don’t know what to say. But I am here. Meet me.”
And He did. Not with fireworks. Not even with clarity. But with His presence.
Sometimes presence is enough. Sometimes, the most honest prayer a soul can pray is simply: “I am here. I have nothing. I need You.” And the God who kept Psalm 88 in His Word — the God who preserved the darkest, most wordless prayer in the Psalter — meets that prayer with the same care He meets every other.
He kept Heman’s prayer. He will keep yours.
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The Psalms teach us that God hears sighs, that He receives groans, that He welcomes silence. They teach us that God honors weakness more than performance, that He interprets tears as fluently as He interprets sentences, that He meets the fainthearted where they are rather than where they should be.
God interprets tears as fluently
as He interprets sentences.
But perhaps the most astonishing thing they teach us is this: that even the darkest, most inarticulate prayer in the collection was worth keeping. Psalm 88 did not get edited out. It did not get replaced with something more encouraging. It was preserved — passed down through the centuries, sung in temple worship, prayed in exile, whispered in sickbeds and prison cells, and pastors’ offices at two in the morning. God thought it worth keeping because He thought the person praying it was worth hearing.
He thinks the same about you.
The Psalms teach us that prayer is not about saying much — it is about coming honestly. And that the soul that comes to God with nothing but its need has already brought the one thing He most wants to receive.
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