Praying Into the Silence

The Psalms make room for the night God feels far away

About fifty of the hundred and fifty psalms are laments. Close to a third of Israel's songbook is people telling God that life hurts and asking where He went.

I pointed that out to our church once, and then I admitted what most of us do with those psalms. We skip them. We memorize Psalm 23 and the big, bright verses of Psalm 119, and we leave the hard ones alone, as if they slipped into the Bible by accident. They didn't. They're equally inspired, and they were written for nights like this one.

The Kitchen at 3:12

The rain hasn't stopped since midnight. She's at the kitchen table under the one pendant light she left on, a mug of coffee going cold in front of her, the cat asleep on the rug by the back door. She came downstairs because lying in bed with her thoughts was worse than sitting up with them. She's tried to pray three times. Each time the words went up and seemed to hit the ceiling and fall back down onto the table.

It isn't the first night. For weeks now prayer has felt like talking into a phone after the call dropped. She hasn't stopped believing, and she hasn't stopped showing up. But the sense that Someone is on the other end has gone quiet, and the quiet is starting to sound like an answer.

"Where Is Your God?"

The psalmist knew that kitchen.

My tears have been my food day and night, While they continually say to me, "Where is your God?" (Psalm 42:3)

When I preached this psalm, I said the voice asking that question isn't always an enemy outside the walls. Sometimes it's the voice in your own head. Sometimes it's a preacher, or a parent, or a friend who means well. And it nearly always comes with an explanation attached: You must have done something wrong. You must have blown it somewhere.

There's even a verse that seems to say so:

Behold, the Lord's hand is not shortened, That it cannot save; Nor His ear heavy, That it cannot hear. But your iniquities have separated you from your God; And your sins have hidden His face from you, So that He will not hear. (Isaiah 59:1-2)

If that's the verse playing in your head at three in the morning, the silence feels like a sentence handed down. Somewhere in the last week you must have closed the door yourself.

Keep reading the chapter, though. Isaiah doesn't leave Israel there. By the end of chapter 59 God has stepped in Himself. "The Redeemer will come to Zion... this is My covenant with them: My Spirit who is upon you, and My words which I have put in your mouth, shall not depart from your mouth" (Isaiah 59:20-21). Paul picks up that same promise and tells us what the covenant does: For this is My covenant with them, When I take away their sins (Romans 11:27).

The separation Isaiah described is the very thing the Redeemer came to remove. In Christ your sins have been taken away, and the Spirit God promised is on you and in you, not as a reward for a good week but as the terms of a covenant Jesus secured. Whatever the quiet is, it isn't your sin standing between you and a Father who has stopped listening. As I told our church that day, your faith established you as right with God because of what Jesus did. That doesn't change at three in the morning.

God Doesn't Mind Your Questions

Look at how honest the psalmist gets. I will say to God my Rock, "Why have You forgotten me?" (Psalm 42:9). He calls God his Rock and accuses Him of forgetting in the same sentence. God kept that line in the Bible. He doesn't mind your questions. If you need to be angry at what life is doing, you can bring that too.

Then the psalmist does something we can learn from. He turns and talks to himself:

Why are you cast down, O my soul? And why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; For I shall yet praise Him, The help of my countenance and my God. (Psalm 42:11)

He isn't waiting for a feeling to come back before he hopes. He's reminding his own soul who God is while the feeling is still gone.

And tucked in the middle of the psalm is a line for anyone awake at this hour: The Lord will command His lovingkindness in the daytime, And in the night His song shall be with me, A prayer to the God of my life (Psalm 42:8). The night has a song in it, even when you can't hear the tune yet. The psalmist wrote that line from inside the same psalm where he asked why God had forgotten him, which means the song and the question were allowed to sit at the same table.

Some nights the most you'll manage is to sit there and say His name, or Hope in God under your breath, and then go back to bed with nothing resolved. That's a real prayer. There will be good days and hard days, and He is with you through every one of them.

She rinses the cold coffee into the sink, turns off the pendant light, and stands for a moment in the dark kitchen listening to the rain, saying the psalm's last line to herself on the way up the stairs.