He Remembers What It Used to Be Like and Says So Out Loud in the Song

The worst part of this is not the emptiness. It is that he remembers.

If a man had never meant it, there would be nothing to compare against. He would just be a man who does not believe much, and that is a simpler position. What he actually has is a memory. He can tell you where he was standing. He can tell you what the room smelled like and what was playing and what he said in the truck on the way home, and that he meant every word of it, and that it was real.

And it is fifteen years later and he cannot get anywhere near it, and the memory is not a comfort. The memory is the problem. It is the thing that keeps proving he is not where he was.

He has stopped bringing it up. There is no good way to say it that does not sound like fishing.

The psalm says it in the same words a man would use

Psalm 42 is written by somebody in this condition, and the description is unnervingly precise. This is the King James Version:

When I remember these things, I pour out my soul in me: for I had gone with the multitude, I went with them to the house of God, with the voice of joy and praise, with a multitude that kept holyday. (Psalm 42:4)

When I remember these things, I pour out my soul in me. The remembering is what empties him.

I had gone with the multitude. Past tense. He used to go with the crowd, with the voice of joy and praise, and he is describing it from the outside now.

That is a man holding a memory of meaning it and being unable to reach it, and the sentence went into the songbook of the people of God and stayed there for three thousand years. Nobody edited it into something more useful. Nobody appended a note explaining that a mature believer should not talk like this.

You are in company here and you were never off the map for feeling it. Psalm 42:4 is in the Bible in the first person and stayed in, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than a better week who makes an old song read as somebody sitting down next to you.

He talks to himself, out loud, in the second person

Then he does something that is worth stopping on, because it is the mechanic of the whole psalm.

Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted in me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him for the help of his countenance. (Psalm 42:5)

He turns and addresses his own soul in the second person. He asks it a question. And then he tells it what to do.

That is not positive thinking and it is not a man pretending to feel better. Look at the order. He states the condition accurately first, cast down and disquieted, no softening. Then he speaks to it. Then he says what he is going to do about it, in the future tense, while still feeling exactly the same.

This is a man declaring something over himself out of a text and a promise rather than out of a mood. He does not wait until the mood turns to say it. The saying comes first and the mood is not consulted.

You have the standing to speak to your own condition and you were given that rather than working up to it. Psalm 42:5 has a man addressing his own soul in the middle of the flatness, and it is His Spirit who makes speaking out of a promise different in kind from talking yourself into something.

What he says God is doing while none of it is felt

Here is the verse that carries the most weight and it is easy to read past:

Yet the LORD will command his lovingkindness in the daytime, and in the night his song shall be with me, and my prayer unto the God of my life. (Psalm 42:8)

In the night his song shall be with me. His song. Not the singer's song. The songwriter, in the middle of a psalm about having no access to any of it, says that God has a song and it is with him at night.

That is a claim about what is happening while nothing is being felt. The activity has not stopped. It has moved out of view.

Paul says the same thing about prayer for people who have run out of words:

Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. (Romans 8:26)

We know not what we should pray for as we ought. That is written into the letter as the normal condition, not the failure state. And the answer given is not that a man should try harder to word it. The answer is that the Spirit is already doing the part that cannot be done.

You have prayer going up on your behalf and you were never the one holding the whole thing together. Romans 8:26 says the Spirit makes intercession with groanings that cannot be uttered, and Psalm 42:8 says God's own song is with a man in the night, which is a description of what is true while nothing at all is felt.

And if the cast down has gone somewhere darker than dryness, if it has gone as far as not wanting to be here, that is not something to sit alone with. A doctor, a counselor, somebody you trust who will pick up the phone. In the United States the 988 crisis line answers day and night. Nobody has to carry that by himself.

He says it three times because it did not work the first time

The last thing worth noticing about this psalm is structural, and it is honest in a way that almost nothing written about dryness is.

He asks the question and gives the answer in verse 5. Then he goes through another round of it, deep calling unto deep, all the waves and billows gone over him. And then in verse 11 he says the exact same thing again, word for word.

And then the next psalm ends with it a third time:

Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me? hope in God: for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God. (Psalm 43:5)

Three times. Which tells you it did not resolve on the first saying, and that the man kept saying it anyway, and that the Bible kept all three.

That is permission to say a true thing more than once without concluding that the repetition proves it is not working.

You have not failed at this by having to say it again, and you were never promised it lands the first time. The written word repeats why art thou cast down, O my soul three times across Psalm 42 and Psalm 43 without apology, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a repeated sentence from becoming a recitation.