When I was learning to pray as an adult, the woman who mentored me suggested that I pray with a psalm every day, starting at Psalm 1 and working my way through to Psalm 150. 

 

Her advice was timely because a few days before, my boyfriend had broken up with me. 

 

Suddenly I was plunged into sadness and loneliness. I didn’t want to see him, which meant isolating myself from my great group of Christian friends. Instead, I stayed in my room and grieved and prayed psalm after psalm. 

 

I quickly learned that the psalms include every variety of human experience and emotion. They are a place in the Bible where God’s people speak with no filter, bringing everything to him. 

Psalm 3:5-6 

With my own voice I will call out to the Lord, and he will answer me from his holy mountain. I lie down and I fall asleep, [and] I will wake up, for the Lord sustains me.

Psalm 6:7-8

I am wearied with sighing; all night long I drench my bed with tears; I soak my couch with weeping. My eyes are dimmed with sorrow, worn out because of all my foes.

Psalm 7:11

God is a shield above me saving the upright of heart.

Psalm 10:14

But you do see; you take note of misery and sorrow; you take the matter in hand. To you the helpless can entrust their cause.

Psalm 13:2-3

How long, Lord? Will you utterly forget me? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I carry sorrow in my soul, grief in my heart day after day?

Psalm 34:19

The Lord is close to the brokenhearted, saves those whose spirit is crushed.

 

The psalms spoke truth. I was brokenhearted, but I also experienced God’s care and attention. Never before had I felt so close to the Father, so looked after by him. 

 

I let the words of the psalms guide me. Learning from their example, I poured out my heart to the Lord, telling God about my disappointment, my anger, my feelings of betrayal, my hopes for the future. I asked for God’s help to get up and get dressed. I relied on his strength to meet up with friends and face the fears of seeing my ex in public. 

 

God, for his part, showed me surprising things: little reminders of my own goodness, insights into who I was apart from my boyfriend, of who I could be on my own. He showed me my resilience, and the good side of having a heart big enough to be broken. He gave me gratitude for my friends and taught me to enjoy solitude and prayer. 

 

During the roughly five months that it took me to pray with each of the psalms, I healed. I grew stronger. I felt more grounded in my identity as God’s beloved daughter. Slowly but surely, my grief slipped away. 

 

What remained was a close friendship with God. The psalms taught me to pray from a place of authenticity and rawness. They showed me how to get real with God and not hold back. I had put aside any facades or ideas of what prayer “should” sound like. I simply opened myself up to him as I was. He met me there with compassion, love, and hope. 

 

This is what deep prayer is all about—connecting with God in the truth of who we are, what we are dealing with, what’s important to us, what keeps us up at night, our dearest hopes. Our God knows when we sit and when we stand. He understands our thoughts from afar (see Psalm 139). There is nothing about us that is a secret to him. He invites us to come to him with it all, entrust it to his care, and receive his presence, strength, and wisdom.

 

Andrea Jackson is a Content Creator and Ministry Consultant at the Evangelical Catholic. The Evangelical Catholic’s mission is to equip Catholics to live out the Great Commission. Learn more.

 

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