You know a lot about God. And prayer still comes out polite.

The same phrases, the same register, nothing you'd actually say out loud to a person you trusted.

The psalms are not like that. David tells God the count of everyone against him. He accuses God of sleeping. He asks how long, and doesn't get an answer, and says it again. Somewhere along the way most of us learned that this isn't how you talk to God. The psalms are evidence that it is.

This is a four-week practice for learning to pray them — not read them, pray them. Each day gives you one psalm, a short note on what that person actually brought to God, and one instruction. Then it stops. Two or three minutes, and you're praying in your own words.

Week one is answering — God speaks first, prayer is the reply. Week two is lament, the largest category in the psalter and the one most of us leave out. Week three is the hard ground: anger, enemies, the psalms you were taught to skip. Week four moves you off the page and into your own words.

The practice comes out of Eugene Peterson's Answering God, which argues that prayer is answering speech and the psalms are the school where you learn it. This guide is one attempt to actually do what he described. If it does anything for you, go read him.

No devotional readings. No reflection questions. Nothing to fill in. Twenty-eight days, and then you keep going without it.

Scripture from the World English Bible (public domain).

Talking to God with the Psalms: Four weeks of learning to pray the psalms, inspired by Eugene Peterson's Answering God

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