Praying the Psalms

9 Be merciful to me, O LORD, for I am in distress;
my eyes grow weak with sorrow,
my soul and my body with grief.

10 My life is consumed by anguish
and my years by groaning;
my strength fails because of my affliction,
and my bones grow weak.

--Psalm 31:9-10

We wake up in the morning and we have our quiet time. And each morning we enter into it with an expectation about what's supposed to happen. We are supposed to "get something out of it." We are supposed to have some sort of an ah-hah moment where God opens our eyes with new insight to a pearl of spiritual wisdom. If this doesn't happen we feel like our time with God has failed. Like it didn't really count. We need a do-over. But the psalms teach us otherwise. The psalms aren't really meant to be studied. The psalms are meant to be prayed. We shouldn't read the psalms trying to get something out of them. Rather, we should live them. The psalms are the prayers and journal entries that our own hearts need to pray and need to write. So I read this psalm today and pray it as if it were my own.