How Long, O Lord?

Today's Reading

Read Psalm 13 in full — it is only six verses, and you should read all of them: "How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me? Consider and answer me, O Lord my God; light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death... But I have trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord, because he has dealt bountifully with me."

Then read Lamentations 3:1-24. It is a man — most likely the prophet Jeremiah — describing what it is like to feel that God himself has hunted him down. "He has driven and brought me into darkness without any light... my soul is bereft of peace; I have forgotten what happiness is." And then, in verse 22, the famous turn: "But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning."

Read Romans 8:22-26 — Paul's astonishing description of creation, the Christian, and the Holy Spirit himself groaning. And Matthew 5:4, the second beatitude: "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted."

Reflection

Psalm 13 is short enough to memorize in one sitting, and most of us have never been taught how to pray it.

It begins with four "how longs." Four. The psalmist is not pretending to be patient. He is letting the question fall, and fall again, and fall again, and fall again, until the weight of it has registered. How long, O Lord? How long will you hide your face? How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me? This is what biblical complaint looks like. It is direct. It is unsanitized. It addresses God by name. It accuses him of what he appears to be doing — forgetting, hiding, allowing the enemy to triumph — without softening any of it. And the Holy Spirit chose to put this prayer in our prayer book.

This is the kind of prayer the modern church has nearly lost. Many of us have been quietly taught that mature Christian prayer sounds confident, grateful, victorious. We have been taught to start with thanksgiving, end with praise, and keep the middle hopeful. We have not been taught that when David prays one of the most famous psalms in the Bible, he spends two-thirds of it telling God it has been long enough, and only the last third turning toward trust.

John Calvin, who wrote one of the longest commentaries on the Psalms in church history, called the Psalter "an anatomy of all the parts of the soul." He believed the Holy Spirit had given us this book precisely so we would learn to pray with our whole humanity instead of with the polished version of ourselves we present to other people. "There is not an emotion of which any one can be conscious that is not here represented as in a mirror." That includes despair. That includes complaint. That includes the long sleepless night in which God's silence is the only thing in the room.

Augustine — who wept openly in the Confessions over his mother's death and over his own sin and over the fragility of friendship — said something even sharper. The reason lament feels foreign to us is not that we are particularly happy. It is that we are particularly distant. Christians who are close to God lament more, not less, because they have stopped pretending in the place where God is. Lament is the language of intimacy with a God big enough to handle it.

Notice what Psalm 13 does in its final two verses. It does not erase the complaint. It does not take back the four "how longs." It says, despite all of that, "I have trusted in your steadfast love." The trust is not the negation of the complaint; the trust is built on the floor of the complaint. The psalmist does not move from sorrow to joy by pretending the sorrow was misplaced. He moves through the sorrow, with God, and arrives at a hope that has felt the weight of the previous five verses.

This is what Tim Keller called "the way to take in fully what's happening — both the bad in the world and the good in God." Lament does both at once. It refuses to soften the bad (which is why it is honest). It refuses to abandon the good (which is why it is faith). The two halves are joined by the simple fact that the prayer is addressed to God himself. Vent on Twitter and you have despair. Vent into the pillow and you have private grief. Vent to God by name and you have lament — which, somehow, is one of Scripture's deepest forms of worship.

Romans 8 hands us the final piece. Paul says creation groans, the believer groans, and the Holy Spirit groans — interceding for us "with groanings too deep for words." Lament is not a sub-Christian prayer to be tolerated until we feel better. It is the very thing the Holy Spirit is doing inside us when we cannot find the words. Christ on the cross prayed Psalm 22:1, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" — the opening line of a lament psalm. The cross itself is wrapped in lament. There is no way to follow Jesus all the way that does not pass through this language.

So today, simply: tell the truth to God. Not the truth as you wish it were. The truth as it is right now. He has put a six-verse template in his Bible to help you. Use it.

Going Deeper

Write your own Psalm 13. Three "how longs" of your own. One petition. One sentence of trust. Do not skip the "how longs" to get to the trust faster. The order matters. The Holy Spirit gave us this proportion on purpose.