Prayer for Every Weather

A few months ago, I began reading a psalm with my husband every night as part of our evening prayers. We would take turns reciting verses while the other person clutched their chest at a poignant metaphor, raised their eyebrows at the more violent imagery, or smirked at some unexpectedly funny line. It was the first time I'd read the Psalms as an adult and certainly the first time I'd immersed myself in them with any regularity. I admit: they were better than I'd remembered. They were urgent and moving; the metaphors were exquisite, and at least once a week we'd encounter a chapter that somehow gave voice to the frustrations we felt about the kids or to our anxiety about a situation in our ward. The Psalms were far from the stuffy, repetitive things that I'd remembered from my youth. And as I read through these ancient poems in preparation for my own devotions every night, I learned something else: my own prayers are pretty boring, by comparison.

There is nothing boring about the Psalms. They are some of ancient Israel's most vibrant poetry, and they capture a wide array of human experience in their short stanzas. There are psalms for when you're in the hospital (Ps 6; 38; 102) and psalms for when you leave (Ps 30), psalms for attending the temple (Ps 24; 84) and being an outlaw on the run (Ps 3; 7; 17; 59; 64). The Psalms show what it looks like to pray in an election year (Ps 72), on your wedding day (Ps 45), before you enter the bishop's office (Ps 51) and when you walk out (Ps 32), when a friend betrays you (Ps 55), on the front lines of battle (Ps 60), when your garden produces well (Ps 65), at ward choir practice (Ps 95), when you are blindingly angry (Ps 58), or confused in a courtroom (Ps 35), in turbulent social times (Ps 12), or when you feel abandoned by God (Ps 13; 22; 42). There's even a psalm for praying during a thunderstorm (Ps 29)!

But through all that variety, there is one thing that the Psalms hold constant: they praise. They praise constantly. I can see why I found them repetitive as a teenager. No matter the setting, no matter the attitude of the speaker, no matter how long or short each psalm happens to be, nearly every one of them includes some element of praise. In a poem expressing fright at the prospect of death, we also hear “Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations” (Ps 90:1). In the same breath that another laments being surrounded by enemies, it also says with confidence “The Lord is my light and my salvation… The Lord is the stronghold of my life” (Ps 27:1). Even as the psalmist describes “eat[ing] ashes like bread, and mingl[ing] tears with my drink,” he can also testify that “You, O Lord, are enthroned forever… You will rise up and have compassion on Zion” (Ps 102:9, 12–13). If there's one thing the Psalms teach us better than any other scripture, it's that prayer is meant for every moment of our lives—and that, somehow, praise can be found through it all.

The pastor Eugene Peterson puts it this way: “The Psalms show praise as … the goal at which all the psalm-prayers arrive after their long travels through the unmapped back countries of pain, doubt, and trouble… The verb ‘praise’ (halel) in its noun form (tehillim) furnishes the title to our prayer book. ‘Book of Praises’ (sepher tehillim) is the Hebrew title to the 150 prayers that we commonly name ‘The Psalms.’”¹ But as he also says, this title is counterintuitive: “This title, ‘Praises,’ catches our attention because it is inaccurate. Most psalms are complaints. They are calls of help by helpless and hurting men and women. They are wrung out of desperate conditions… How can it be appropriate, then, to name these prayers ‘Praises’?”²

How indeed! Why does a book dedicated to the troubles and griefs of God's people also foreground so much adoration? How can they lament in so many different voices and from so many different contexts and share such a unified commitment to praise?

The answer, I believe, is found in Psalm 1:

“Blessed is the one … whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night. That person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither.” (Psalm 1:1–3)

Notice the image: a tree planted by a stream. It's easy to imagine, really—it's the kind of thing you see in a Thomas Kinkade painting or a nice bit of landscaping. But the point is agricultural, not aesthetic. Because this tree is “planted by streams of water,” its leaves are always green, its branches never shrivel, it bears fruit like clockwork every spring. This is a tree that flourishes independent of the weather. Even in times of drought, it survives where other trees cannot. It doesn't rely on rainfall or snowfall or morning dew or any form of weather-dependent precipitation because it is nourished by something much steadier, and much more abundant.

And the implicit promise to the reader is that if they learn to pray in the way modeled by the psalms, they will become like that tree. It is this image that the following 150 chapters illustrate. The voices across the psalms sometimes rejoice and sometimes sorrow. They are illustratively subject to the gamut of mortal weather conditions. But they also insist on unfailing adoration. It runs through this book like water running down a hillside.

This well-watered tree reminds me of Christ's promise of peace not as the world giveth (John 14:27) or Paul's serenity that passes all understanding (Philippians 4:7). It's the kind of steadiness that I've seen in the lives of friends and loved ones who, no matter the circumstances of their life, hold faithful and hopeful. The Psalms reissue the promise that that sort of peace is possible, and then they set about—for 150 chapters—showing it to be true. Here, in these pages, are avatars of the entire human condition, a whole congregation of sorrowing and rejoicing and frightened and ecstatic and bitter and romantic characters, all brought together in a single book of worship. Prayer sustains every speaker. It is the way each of these voices negotiates their situation, whatever it may be. And then these prayers are collected into a single book, bound by the promise that God hears His people, with the image of a flourishing broadleaf on its cover.

The Psalms don't depict the variety of human emotion simply for accuracy's sake; rather, they are showing us the height and breadth of what prayer will help us endure. They are showing us the weather conditions through which we might have always-green leaves, the depths through which God's word will sustain us. And, most importantly, they sample the songs of those who have learned to drink from that stream. Listen closely. Can you hear the burble of lively waters in the background? Can you see the sparkle that glints in its eddies? This is the current that flows through the Psalms; this, more than anything, is what they channel.

“God is our refuge and our strength,
An ever-present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear.”

“Sing joyfully to the LORD, you righteous.
… The earth is full of his unfailing love.”

“Sing the praises of the LORD,
you his faithful people;
praise his holy name.
… Weeping may stay for the night,
but rejoicing comes in the morning.”

“You turned my wailing into dancing;
you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy.
… LORD my God, I will praise you forever.”

Notes

1. Eugene Peterson, Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer (HarperOne, 1989), 121. ↩

2. Ibid. ↩