Prayer in Dry Seasons

The psalm opens with one of the most beautiful and honest images in all of Scripture. As a deer pants for water, so my soul pants for You, God. This is not a comfortable description of quiet devotion. It is the language of desperate need. A deer that is panting for water is in real distress. The psalmist is saying that his longing for God is that urgent, that dry and that real.

Notice that the psalmist does not pretend the dryness is not happening. He does not perform spiritual contentment. He names what is true: his tears have been his food. People are asking where his God is. He is in genuine pain.

This is the first important lesson of dry seasons. Honesty before God is not a failure of faith. It is itself a form of prayer. The psalmist brings his actual condition to God rather than waiting until he has recovered enough to present something more presentable.

In verse four the psalmist pours out his soul and then does something significant. He remembers. He recalls the days when he led the crowd to the house of God with joy and praise. This is not nostalgia for its own sake. It is a deliberate act of anchoring himself to what he knows has been true.

In a dry season, feelings cannot be trusted as a guide to reality. The feeling that God is absent is real, but it is not the same as the fact of God's absence. The psalmist uses memory to reach back past his current feelings to something more solid: the record of what God has done and what he himself has known.

This is a practice available to every believer. When prayer feels empty, you can remember the times it did not feel empty. When God seems silent, you can recall the moments He was not. Memory does not fix the dry season, but it keeps you from concluding that the dry season is the whole story.

Twice in this psalm, in verses five and eleven, the psalmist interrupts himself with the same question and the same answer. Why are you in despair, my soul? Hope in God. For I shall still praise Him.

This is one of the most practical things in all of the Psalms. The psalmist is talking to himself, or more precisely, he is preaching to himself. He is refusing to let his feelings have the last word. He does not deny that the despair is real. He addresses it directly and then counters it with a statement of resolve: I shall still praise Him.

That word still is important. It is not praise that has arrived after the difficulty has passed. It is praise committed to in advance, chosen in the middle of the darkness. This is faith operating not by feeling but by decision, by remembered truth and by the character of God rather than the comfort of the moment.

Verse seven contains a striking phrase. Deep calls to deep at the noise of your waterfalls. The psalmist is being overwhelmed. He uses the image of waves and billows passing over him. But even in that image God is present. Even the deep is calling to deep in connection with God's voice.

Then in verse eight comes a quiet confidence that sits just beneath the surface of the whole psalm. The Lord will command His lovingkindness in the daytime and in the night His song will be with me. The psalmist does not yet feel this. But he states it as a settled conviction.

Dry seasons do not mean God has withdrawn His lovingkindness. They mean we are in a season where His faithfulness must be trusted rather than felt. This is not lesser faith. In some ways it is more tested and therefore more genuine faith than faith that is always accompanied by warm feeling.