There is a prayer in the Bible that starts with the most devastating sentence a human being can say to God.
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
If you have been in church long enough you will recognise those words from the cross. Jesus cried them out in His darkest moment, quoting Psalm 22 from memory while He was dying. And that alone tells you something important about this Psalm. It was not written as a theological exercise. It was not written from a place of comfortable distance. It was written from inside the darkness, by someone who genuinely could not feel God and was honest enough to say so at full volume.
But here is the thing about Psalm 22 that gets missed when we only ever read the first verse. It does not end where it begins. Somewhere in the middle of this Psalm something shifts. The despair does not disappear. The circumstances do not change. And yet the writer moves, somehow, from my God why have you forsaken me to I will declare your name to my people, in the assembly I will praise you.
That turn is one of the most important movements in all of Scripture. And if you are in a dark season right now, understanding how it happens and why it matters might be one of the most useful things you read this week.
The cry — giving yourself permission to be honest with God.
Psalm 22 opens with raw, unfiltered abandonment. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? I cry out by day but you do not answer. By night, but I find no rest.
Read that slowly. This is not a polished prayer. This is not a faith-filled declaration. This is a person who feels completely alone, who has been crying out and hearing nothing back, who is exhausted and confused and honest enough to bring all of that directly to God without softening it first.
And it is in the Bible. Inspired, canonised, included in the hymnbook of God's people for thousands of years. Which means God did not look at this prayer and decide it was too raw to keep. He kept it. He preserved it. He put it in the collection of songs His people were supposed to sing together in worship.
That is not a small thing. That is God saying: this kind of honesty is welcome here. The darkness is not too dark to bring to me. The abandonment you feel is not too extreme for me to handle. Bring it. Say it. Cry it out.
One of the most damaging things Christian culture can do to people in dark seasons is communicate, explicitly or implicitly, that the feeling of abandonment is a sign of weak faith. That if you were really trusting God you would not feel this way. That the right response to darkness is immediate declaration of truth, not honest expression of pain.
Psalm 22 dismantles that completely. The writer does not skip the darkness to get to the praise. He goes through it. He names it in full. He gives it words and sends it upward and refuses to pretend it is something other than what it is.
If you are in a season where God feels absent and your prayers feel like they are going nowhere and the darkness is louder than anything else right now, you are allowed to pray like Psalm 22 opens. You are allowed to say I cannot feel you and I do not understand this and I am exhausted from crying out. That prayer is not faithless. It is one of the most faith-filled things you can do because it means you still believe there is someone worth being honest with.
The remembering — what happens before the turn.
Here is something worth noticing about the structure of Psalm 22. The turn from despair to praise does not happen suddenly or without any movement leading up to it. Before the Psalmist arrives at praise, he does something specific. He remembers.
Verses 4 and 5: in you our ancestors put their trust. They cried to you and were saved. They trusted in you and were not put to shame.
Verses 9 and 10: yet you brought me out of the womb. You made me trust in you, even at my mother's breast. From birth I was cast on you. From my mother's womb you have been my God.
In the middle of feeling completely abandoned, the Psalmist turns his attention to history. Not his current experience, which feels like absence. His history with God, which tells a different story. He looks back at what God has done. For his ancestors. For him personally from the very beginning of his life. He rehearses the faithfulness that his present darkness is temporarily obscuring.
This is not denial. He does not pretend the darkness is not real. He holds both things at the same time. I cannot feel you right now AND you have always been faithful. The current experience feels like abandonment AND the historical record says something different.
That tension is where faith actually lives. Not in the absence of doubt. Not in the pretending away of darkness. In the willingness to hold what you currently feel alongside what you have previously known, and to let the history speak into the present even when the present is very loud.
This is why spiritual memory matters so much. Why keeping a record of what God has done in your life, in a journal or in your mind or in conversations with trusted people, is not just a nice spiritual practice. It is armour for the dark seasons. Because the dark seasons will come and when they do your current experience will feel more real than anything else. Having a record of faithfulness to look back on gives you something solid to stand on when the ground underneath your feet feels like it has shifted.
The turn — and how it actually happens.
Psalm 22 verse 24 is where everything changes: for he has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one. He has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help.
Notice what the Psalmist does not say. He does not say the circumstances changed. He does not say the darkness lifted. He does not say God finally answered in a way he could hear or feel or point to. He says God has not hidden his face. God has listened.
The turn in Psalm 22 is not a turn in circumstances. It is a turn in perspective. A reorientation of what the Psalmist is choosing to look at and trust. He moves from looking at what he cannot feel to looking at what he knows. From the experience of absence to the reality of presence. From the silence he is experiencing to the listening he chooses to believe is happening.
That is the turn. And it is genuinely one of the hardest things a person of faith is ever asked to do. To choose to believe in the presence and attentiveness of God in a season when everything you feel is telling you the opposite.
It does not require you to stop feeling what you feel. The darkness does not have to disappear for the turn to happen. The Psalmist still knows he is in a hard place when he gets to verse 24. But he makes a choice about what he is going to anchor himself to. Not the feeling of absence. The fact of faithfulness.
And something opens up when he makes that choice. Verse 25 to the end of the Psalm are an outpouring of praise that is all the more powerful because of where it came from. This is not the praise of someone who has never suffered. This is the praise of someone who went all the way down into the darkness and found that God was there too, even when it did not feel like it.
That kind of praise has a weight to it that comfortable praise does not carry. It costs something. And because it costs something it means something. Both to the one who offers it and to the God who receives it.
What this means for the season you are in.
If you are in the cry right now, stay there. Do not rush yourself out of it. Do not perform okayness you do not feel. Bring the darkness to God in honest, unfiltered words and trust that He is big enough to receive it. Psalm 22 is proof that He is.
If you are somewhere in the middle, in the place between the cry and the turn, start remembering. Get out a journal or sit quietly and go back over your history with God. The moments He came through. The prayers He answered. The seasons He brought you out of. Let the memory speak into the present darkness. Let the faithfulness of the past be an anchor for the uncertainty of now.
And if you are approaching the turn, or standing on the other side of it, let the praise come. Not the performance of praise but the real thing. The kind that knows what it cost to get here. The kind that carries the weight of the darkness it came through. That kind of praise is one of the most powerful things a human being can offer to God.
Psalm 22 does not promise that the dark seasons will not come. It does not promise that God will always feel close or that prayer will always feel like it is landing somewhere. What it promises, in the movement from its first verse to its last, is that the darkness is not the final word. That the cry is heard even when it does not feel like it. That the turn is possible even from the very bottom of the pit.
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me. The Psalm starts there. But it does not end there. And neither will you.
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