Dear St. Luke’s Family,

Do you sometimes have trouble telling God how you really feel? As though there are some feelings and thoughts that just aren’t appropriate to say to God? Doubts, angers, and fears that will be found unacceptable? Reading several of our Psalms from the Daily Office this week has reminded me that the Psalmists didn’t seem to suffer from our polite reservations. They laid it all out in their prayers. Consider reading Psalms 80, 77, and 79 today. I pray that you will find them, and my reflection, helpful in this.

Peace,

Rick+

The Psalms: The prayers that pray us. I think of the Psalms as the prayers that pray us. That’s because the Psalmists are boldly honest, sometimes bluntly so, in their prayers with God. We see it in all our Psalms this week. Their honesty shocks us and even causes us to recoil at times. “I would never say such a thing to God!” We think. “What a terrible attitude, thought, wish, request!” We can come away from the Psalms, if we allow ourselves to, with a sense that we are different from the writers; that we are a better people. But on closer inspection, if we are honest, we find that we have merely tamped down and covered over the same in ourselves. The honesty of the Psalmists prays for us what we do not want to own. And that is what God wants. God wants us to be honest about what we are thinking and feeling. It is when we have trod the breadth of our thinking, and plumbed the depths of our emotions, that our prayers become a dialogue with God. A Place of meeting. Be fully honest in your prayers today.

Then do one more thing as the Psalmists nearly always do: It is there, in verse 11 of Psalm 77, “I will call to mind the deeds of the Lord; I will remember your wonders of old.” Remember and dwell on God’s faithfulness in your life in the past. It will restore your sense of God’s faithfulness to you for the present, and it will give you confidence in God’s faithfulness for you into the future.