OUR OWN PSALMS

Photo courtesy of author.

I’ve always been a student of the Bible. From finding a comfort in memorizing four verses on a high school mission trip, to leading Bible studies in youth group, to realizing how quickly the right answers stuck to my lips when the pastor would ask rhetorical questions from the pulpit, I felt drawn to its stories and history during my Southern Baptist upbringing. It’s what drove me to leave behind my choir-nerd status and major in biblical studies (including five semesters of Greek) in college on my way to becoming a missionary.

And I made it all the way to India, passport and visa in one hand, leather-bound ESV journaling bible in the other. My teammate and I read Psalm 107 together on our first Sunday there, thinking it described us perfectly: “They reached a city to dwell in… [God] brought them to their desired haven” (vv. 7,30).

But within six months, my dream for the rest of my life changed radically. My entire team left and I was alone. Within a year, I knew I’d be leaving for good at the end of my term. When I first confessed this to a fellow missionary over the phone, she warned me that I would be leaving behind not just my calling, but God. She quoted Romans 11:29 at me: “The gifts and callings of God are irrevocable.”

As my grip tightened on my phone, I pursed my lips together to keep from screaming: “That’s not what that verse is about!”

So began a renewed sense of being a student of the Bible, one that didn’t want to be taught by others’ interpretations anymore, but by the Spirit within me. I started reading other verses taken out of context–by others and myself–to shore up our own confidence and threatened sense of calling. But I had the advantage of a shattered confidence and a no-longer-true calling, which freed up my heart to hear the words of scripture in a new light. And that light was pretty simple: Love.

Radical, I know. Very different from the obedience-above-all directive of the tradition I grew up in.

But it set me free in ways that I didn’t see coming when my old beliefs were in shambles. Ultimately, that freedom led me to embrace the identity of a deconstructing exvangelical, especially as 2020 witnessed multitudes of angry churches ignoring systemic racism and claiming they were divinely protected from a virus that was killing hundreds of people a day.

My church in Nashville, on the other hand, didn’t meet for almost two years, dared to speak on hard topics, and wore masks and kept distancing even when we did start meeting again in 2021. We read through Acts together as we embraced the need to move away from our expensive, historic landmark church rental. I felt allowed to change my interpretations of Paul’s words. I had long avoided the letters of Paul after they had bolstered me to become a missionary.

Then, I turned to the psalms. An author I admired, Emily P. Freeman, recorded Psalm 139 on her podcast, “The Next Right Thing,” and when she sent it out, she said this: "These are the days of returning to the Psalms as we hold our decisions and ourselves with care."

Like our church, my partner and I were in the midst of a few big decisions ourselves. We were on the cusp of moving to Raleigh, NC, and I was asking to go part-time and freelance with my marketing job so that I could focus more on writing. So I took Freeman’s words, opened my Message journaling bible, as unfamiliar of a translation as I could get, and wrote “Handle with Care” at the top of the first page of psalms.

I didn’t follow my usual pattern, forged from years of “quiet times” spent with coffee and an open journal, of writing down my thoughts, prayers, and application points from the Bible to my own life. Instead, I started writing my own psalms. I went back to my roots, before words became tools, when I wrote angsty poetry. My biblical acumen and my angsty childhood pen married in that moment, with line breaks and the occasional rhyme, in order to understand–finally–what it really meant to a human talking with the divine: a conversation of love and loss instead of labor and a blind faith. An honest conversation instead of a diminishing and reality-dismissing one.

I took the psalmists’ words and wrote my own translations:

God likes you. Truly.

That’s the blessing - his acceptance

of you. Full stop. – Psalm 1

rest is confirmation

that God is taking your hand again

and not letting go. – Psalm 16

No – you were made for Arms,

not altars,

Belovedness, not brackish

modes of living while dying…

Be held, beloved–

and let that be the Altar.

Pieta, not piety

is what you’re made for. – Psalm 33

That first winter in Raleigh, I wrote reflections on my words, rereading my own psalms like I might’ve read the originals, and discovered a love for my own voice. Years ago, that love might’ve made me feel prideful, and therefore sinful. Now, it brings me joy, joy I believe God has when he hears us–but especially when he hears us go off-script from the shoulds we’ve wrapped faith in and instead find our own honesty, just like the psalmists did. There’s little to no pretense when it comes to them. I laughed reading the first psalm I wrote, because of how informal it sounds compared to David’s, even in the Message. I journaled, But I think that’s the beauty of writing to respond; it must be in your own voice, your own truth as you’ve learned, unlearned, and grown from it.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that this responsive writing was sinking in, deeper than I knew. In 2022, I asked my church in Raleigh if I could lead a group over the summer, for anyone who wanted to try their hand at writing their own psalms. The group was a bust, with no one showing up after the first meeting, but I stuck with the plan and kept writing my own psalms, interpreting and applying as I went. This time, I didn’t just retranslate; I rewrote, keeping the form and tone of each psalm intact, whether confrontational, confessional, or worshipful, while applying the circumstances I was in, the headlines I was reading, and the honesty I needed in all of it.

When I read David’s words in psalm 9 that summer, they rang empty in my ears, enemies still rampant and seemingly winning–in charge, even, sending thoughts and prayers instead of meaningful actions to stop anyone with a gun in their hands. At first, I found myself not wanting to write, let alone pray the original. I held my pen tightly, spinning it, not knowing where to begin. But I knew from spending the last 10 months reading these prayers that the invitation is never to push away how you feel (nor how the original author might’ve felt); instead, it’s always to dive right into those emotions. So, my psalm 9 is a  biting prayer, different from David’s, but that’s what makes it a true response:

Where were you in Uvalde?

Sandy Hook? Pulse?

Striding in, on, over, against

the coattails of the rubberneckers,

the ones who watch and pray,

but who stop short of meaningful actions.

You aren't with their empty words;

you are with the weeping,

the mothers jumping fences,

the lovers, the ones yelling

and screaming for someone to move,

to do something, anything.

You are there, taking charge

in all the ways we cannot see.

But once we see you,

we cannot look away.

We cannot stand with those

empty words or hollow prayers

any longer.

So, like you,

we stride against them;

we yell in their ears.

Our demands are hallelujahs;

our relentlessness a wonder

in the wide array of praise

that cannot be contained

by our theology or interpretations

anymore.

Instead, it is found in

the bloody footprints

and holy hands

of active redemption and resurrection,

happening here and now,

in the last, last, last days.

Then I found myself staring down at the psalm that perhaps started all of this, a perpetual straw that broke my back that first week in India: Psalm 107. Instead of remembering that Sunday in India, as I had in the first version I wrote, I wanted a new version, a new glimpse into God’s love, that undid our faulty application in India. I wrote:

Appreciate God’s deep love–

this is true wisdom.

Recount your different

stories and seasons

with love as the driving force.

But it’s often not

what we look for,

this love.

We notice only its surface:

The waves, the storm,

the drought, the famine,

the danger, the prison,

the home turned hostile,

the shattering sounds.

Beneath these is

a God always looking for us,

a God writing new stories,

a God caring beyond the circumstantial.

The surface carries our involvement,

our participation,

even our autonomy–

allowed, welcomed, characterizing.

Beneath is so much more

than we’ve allowed ourselves to know:

mystery, grace,

miraculous mercy,

creation at command,

transformative power–

all for us,

never against us.

Maybe to call out

from our desperate condition

isn’t a poor surrender,

a white flag undone

in our filthy, feeble hands.

It’s a plunge into the waters

to take another’s,

an intimate gesture

of belonging.

This is how we can

appreciate God’s deep love–

Tell the stories

of divine partnership

without shaming ourselves.

This process was a re-wilding of my faith, a reworking of traditions etched into me from generations before. A faith that needed words from the start–to confess, to memorize, to study, to pray, evolved into a faith that wanted them–to rewrite, to un-memorize, to unlearn the “right” answers, to find my own voice in relation to God’s.

I found it, perhaps, just as the psalmists did: one line at a time.