Faith & Doubt

Anger at God is not the failure of faith. Apathy is. The angry person is still on the line. The apathetic person has hung up. Part three of A Slow Walk Through Psalm 88.

Most lament psalms turn at some point — yet I will trust, but you, O Lord. Psalm 88 has no pivot. It ends in the dark. The editors knew, and they left it. Part two of A Slow Walk Through Psalm 88.

Heman was a chief musician of the temple. He led worship for the king. By every external measure, his life was working — and he wrote one of the bleakest sentences in the Bible. Darkness is my closest friend. Part one of A Slow Walk Through Psalm 88.

A cure is the removal of the problem. Healing is the slow restoration of the whole person. The church has used these words as if they meant the same thing. They do not, and the confusion is doing real damage.

You probably will not say it out loud. You may not have said it to yourself yet. You have only felt it. Anger. At God. And you were raised, somewhere along the way, to believe this is the one emotion Christians are not allowed to have.

Psalm 124. A song sung after the danger has passed, after the floodwaters have gone down. The whole psalm is a backward look — and it asks a question of us we almost never stop to ask.

This is the world the Bible was written for. Most of us have been quietly assuming that stability is the baseline. It is not. The Scriptures are letters from the same trouble we are now in.

Jesus prayed on the night before he died. He asked, three times, for the cup to pass. The cup was not taken. This is the most important unanswered prayer in the Bible.

There are seasons when prayer goes quiet. Where the words won't come and the ceiling feels closer than it used to. If you have lived with depression or anxiety, you know this silence.