psalms

I've been reading Philip Yancey's book about prayer. I've been feeling lost knowing what to pray, how to pray, when to pray, if I even should bother with prayer. So it's been good to read his insights and feel encouraged and inspired a little bit.

Round about the middle of the book he encourages people to use the Psalms to pray. They were written by real people expressing real emotion to God. We could do well to model our prayers after them, or even just pray them as our own prayers.

He quotes Eugene Peterson (writer of The Message):
"Untutored we tend to think that prayer is what good people do when they are doing their best. It is not….It is the means by which we get everything in our lives out in the open before God. And so in my pastoral work of teaching people to pray, I started paraphrasing the Psalms into the rhythms and idiom of contemporary English."

So today after complaining to Daryl and then apologizing for dumping on him I told him I should just go pray about it, and started telling him about using the Psalms to help me. But how to find just the right Psalm to express what you want to say to God?

I need something that says, "I'm sorry I'm being such a sucky baby, but you're kinda being a jerk, too."

Actually, maybe that's good enough as it is.

Maybe that's a Psalm of Corrie.

2 comments:

Mom said...

Thank you, thank you, for this post Corrie. You are an inspiration to me. God blessings.

beckster said...

I miss talking to you, this means a lot to me right now..