The Psalms Where Everything Goes Wrong

Think about the last time you sang in church.

Chances are good it was about joy, or victory, or being lifted up. We sing plenty about those things, and they’re worth singing about. But sit in the pew long enough, in a hard year, and you may notice something. The songs don’t know about your Tuesday. They don’t have a verse for the phone call, the diagnosis, the empty chair, the church that let you go.

The Bible does have one. In fact, it has a lot of them.

The Psalms Nobody Picks

Laments make up a large share of the Psalms, more than most of us would guess from what we sing on Sundays. These are the psalms where the speaker is in trouble and says so, loudly.

“I am weary with my moaning; every night I flood my bed with tears” (Ps. 6:6). “My tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me all the day long, ‘Where is your God?'” (Ps. 42:3). And the one that sounds almost rude: “Awake! Why are you sleeping, O Lord?” (Ps. 44:23).

They weren’t smuggled into the Bible. They’re in the book the church has prayed for thousands of years, the one meant to teach us how to talk to God.

God didn’t just permit his people to bring their pain to him. He gave them the words.

How a Lament Works

Lament is more than venting. It’s bringing the pain to God, and many of the psalms give us a shape for doing that. Psalm 13 is short enough to see the whole thing.

It begins with a cry: “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” (Ps. 13:1). Then more of the same. How long must I carry this? How long will my enemy win? The speaker names the pain, plainly and without apology.

Then comes the request. “Consider and answer me, O Lord my God; light up my eyes” (Ps. 13:3). Not a polite one, but a request.

And then something shifts, in the last verses: “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” (Ps. 13:5-6).

Look at what happened. The psalm never tells us that the circumstances changed. We don’t hear that the enemy went away or that the trouble ended. What changes in the words of the prayer is where the speaker places his trust. He begins with the problem and ends by remembering the promise.

Three things are worth noticing about that shape.

First, the complaint is addressed to God. It isn’t a grumble to the neighbors or a social media post. Even at its angriest, the lament assumes God is listening, and that’s already a kind of trust. People who’ve given up on God don’t usually bother yelling at him.

Second, the turn isn’t forced. Some laments don’t make one, or not right away. The speaker doesn’t skip over the pain to get to the happy part. The complaint has its own place in the prayer.

Third, the turn doesn’t come from feeling better. It comes from remembering what’s true about God. “I have trusted in your steadfast love” is a statement about who God is, said in the middle of a hard stretch, not a report on mood.

Not every lament makes that turn. Psalm 88 ends without a declaration of renewed confidence, and its last word is darkness. God saw fit to include that prayer in Scripture, too.

Even the Angry Ones

Some of the psalms go further than sorrow. They ask God to deal with the people who caused it, in language that’s hard to read aloud in church. Psalm 109 asks that the enemy’s days be few (Ps. 109:8). Psalm 137, sung by exiles who had watched their city burn, ends by wishing violence on the children of their captors (Ps. 137:9). Scholars call these the imprecatory psalms, and the church has often skipped them, a little embarrassed.

These words are disturbing, and I don’t think we should pretend otherwise. Psalm 137 doesn’t just ask for justice. It imagines violence against children. That’s horrifying, and it’s supposed to make us uncomfortable.

But remember who is speaking. These are people who have lived through terrible violence. Their city is destroyed, their families torn apart, their future taken. The psalm lets us hear what that suffering has done to them. That doesn’t mean every desire expressed in their grief is righteous. Scripture can give voice to human anger without asking us to imitate everything that anger says. It does mean that even our ugliest thoughts can be brought to God instead of hidden from him, without waiting to be cleaned up first.

And the New Testament tells us what to do with the sword: “Never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord'” (Rom. 12:19). At their best, these psalms are a way of setting the sword down and handing it to someone else.

Your own prayers for justice may have sin in them. They may have anger, and some pettiness. Don’t let that keep you from praying them. God can sort the good from the bad, and he’ll answer as he sees fit. Underneath the rage is something he is glad to hear: you brought it to him and not somewhere worse.

The Woman Who Wouldn’t Stop

Jesus tells a story about a widow and a judge. The judge “neither feared God nor respected man,” and the widow keeps showing up, saying, “Give me justice against my adversary” (Luke 18:2-3). Luke tells us why Jesus told it: so that his hearers “ought always to pray and not lose heart” (Luke 18:1). In the end the judge gives in, mostly to be rid of her.

The point is a contrast. If a judge like that will answer someone who keeps coming, how much more will a good God answer his own? Widows were among the most vulnerable people in that society, and this woman had to plead her own case before a judge who didn’t care about justice. Jesus says of his people, “Will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night?” (Luke 18:7). You aren’t left to fend for yourself. God hears the cries of his people, even when justice seems painfully slow.

The lament psalms are what that persistence sounds like when someone puts it into words.

Jesus Prayed These

This is the part that changes how I read them.

On the cross, Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46). That’s the first line of Psalm 22, one of the great laments. He didn’t invent words for his worst hour. He reached for a psalm. Elsewhere he prays another: “Into your hand I commit my spirit” (Luke 23:46, from Psalm 31).

Hebrews says that in the days of his flesh, Jesus “offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death” (Heb. 5:7). Loud cries and tears. That’s not a Savior who found suffering easy, or who thought grief meant a shortage of faith.

So when you pray a lament, you’re not stepping out of line. You’re using words Christ himself has prayed. And he doesn’t merely show us how to pray through suffering. He has entered suffering himself, all the way to the cross. We do not have a high priest “who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses” (Heb. 4:15), and he invites us to “draw near to the throne of grace” (Heb. 4:16), which is not the same as inviting us to approach with our best manners.

The cross is also where God’s answer to suffering comes into focus. Not as an explanation for every terrible thing that happens, but in the Son of God entering our suffering and bearing our sin. The wrong done to you is named for what it is, and so is the wrong in us, and Christ bore the cost of both. Nobody has to pretend the hurt was small in order to be forgiven, and nobody has to carry it alone. His resurrection, the “firstfruits” (1 Cor. 15:20), is the promise that suffering and death will not have the last word. “We have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous” (1 John 2:1). When your cry goes up, his voice goes up with it.

When the Church Is Where It Hurts

One of the laments hits a nerve for a lot of people I know.

“I have become a stranger to my brothers, an alien to my mother’s sons” (Ps. 69:8). It’s the voice of someone who has been pushed out by his own people. If you’ve been shown the door by a family, a congregation, or a faith that was supposed to be home, that verse has been waiting for you. Nobody in the psalm tells him to be grateful. Nobody says the people who hurt him meant well. He says what happened, to God, in the open.

The psalmists were allowed to say the unflattering thing. So are you.

What Laments Don’t Do

The laments rarely give us a tidy explanation for why suffering happened. They don’t guarantee justice on your timetable, either. God may bring some of it now, and you’re free to ask for it, boldly. But he’s promised it without exception at the end, when Christ makes every wrong right. They don’t hurry anyone along. And they don’t promise that the story ends well before it has ended.

When we mute the lament, we teach people that grief has no place in worship, and the grieving learn to stay quiet, or to leave. Paul says to “weep with those who weep” (Rom. 12:15), and it’s hard to do that if our prayer book has no language for it.

Lament isn’t a failure to move forward. Sometimes it’s the only honest prayer a person can manage for a long time. And God doesn’t stop listening because we’ve asked the same question a hundred times. I wrote about this from another angle in When Prayer Has Stopped Working, and about the harder question underneath it in Where Is God When It Hurts?.

Try One

A quick exercise, if you’re willing. Start with one sentence: God, I wish ______ were different. A relationship. A diagnosis. A death. Something done to you years ago. Whatever filled the blank is where your lament starts, and it’s already a prayer.

If you’re in a hard season, here’s a small way to start. Pick one psalm, perhaps Psalm 13, and pray it out loud, slowly, as your own. When it says “How long,” let it mean your “how long.” When it names an enemy, let it be whatever is pressing on you. Don’t hurry to verse 5. If you only get as far as verse 2 today, that’s a real prayer.

If you want a framework, it’s four beats. Say who you’re talking to. Say what hurts, plainly. Ask for what you need. Then, when you can, say one thing you know about God, even if you don’t feel it. That’s a lament.

And if you’re thinking your faith is too small for any of this, remember that faith isn’t a performance you have to get right. Christ is the one who saves you, not the strength of your believing. Even a small and struggling faith can hold on to him.

Lament isn’t the opposite of faith. It’s faith with its eyes open.