My Experience
I have always found it difficult to set aside time for dedicated prayer. My independent spirit and my drive to succeed fight against the idea that I need God to intervene in my life. I can do it myself!
When I am confronted with a problem, my first instinct is to solve it. Myself.
So a practice - however important it might be in the Scriptures - that encourages me to express trust in God and grow closer to Him, while it sounds good and important, is nevertheless difficult for me.
That began to change dramatically on the day of my calamity (Psalm 18:18, ESV).
That day led me to revive a practice I had tried and found intriguing in the past (but didn’t continue in) - praying the psalms. Meditating upon them. Listening to them. Singing them. Praying them. Transforming them into my words, applicable to my situation.
Here’s some of what I have discovered (with a vast, unlimited amount of learning still available to me) over the past couple of years of diligently praying the psalms.
As I travel the ancient paths of David, Asaph, the Sons of Korah, and others (and of the editors who meditated upon and compiled the psalms for the Israelites’ use in worship and prayer), the number of situations which represent a “calamity” increases as I learn just how dependent on God I am.
Over time, as I consistently pray the psalms, they transform my instinct so that my first reaction to calamity is to cry out to God and place myself in a position of trust (rather than trying to solve problems myself). As I apprentice myself to the psalms and soak in their words and their rhythm, my neural pathways are rerouted so that my first thought when confronted with difficulty is to recognize that “my help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth” (Psalm 121:2)
I am currently working on a book project that will dive more deeply into a selection of psalms and benefit from more extensive study. What you will find here, though, will be largely unprocessed - visceral reactions to what I read in the psalms, raw expressions of emotion, a crying out in the midst of chaos (fair warning: it’s entirely possible that when I study a psalm in more depth, these unprocessed thoughts may not seem as applicable - or even valid - any longer).
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