Some of the most careful prayers people pray are covering for something. The words stay respectful, while underneath them sits anger at God that never gets said. This guide offers a seven-day practice of honest lament prayer. It starts by finding the unspoken rule that taught you to keep that anger quiet, and it ends by checking whether that rule holds up once you have spoken truthfully to God.
You can work through it alone in about forty minutes, then carry the daily practice through the week. A group can cover the first half in one meeting, practice for a week, and return to talk about the last section. Nothing in it requires you to tell anyone else what you prayed.
Start with the rule you were handed
Most people who hide anger from God are not choosing to deceive him. They are obeying a rule they never examined. Someone modeled it, a sermon implied it, or a family simply never did otherwise. Lisa Fields names the fear behind that rule in blunt terms. Many people assume “they’ll get struck by lightning if they ask questions.” Your fear may be quieter, but it does the same work. It keeps the real prayer off your lips.
Before you open Scripture, take five minutes with a blank page and finish these three sentences in your own words. Do not polish them.
- When I am angry with God, I am afraid that saying so will…
- I first learned that from…
- The prayer I usually pray instead sounds like…
Keep the page for the end of the week. Dr. Robert Smith Jr. said something about his own grief that applies here: “you don’t know what you believe until it’s time to believe it.” The rule you wrote down is one of your beliefs about God, and the week ahead will test it.
Look at how a lament is built
Lament is a kind of prayer the Bible preserves in the Psalms, Job, Jeremiah and Lamentations. It is mostly poetry, and poetry speaks from inside an experience rather than summarizing doctrine. When a psalmist says God has forgotten him, he is not writing a statement of faith. He is telling God what it feels like.
Read Psalm 13 out loud, all six verses. Then go back and look at its parts.
Verses 1-2 are complaint. Count the times the psalmist says “how long.” There are four, starting with “How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” (Psalm 13:1). He does not soften the charge or explain that he knows God never really forgets.
Verses 3-4 are request. He asks God to consider him, answer him and keep him alive.
Verses 5-6 are trust: “But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation” (Psalm 13:5).
Notice two things. The complaint comes first and takes up as much room as the trust. And the trust does not erase the complaint. God kept both in the same psalm. The prayer moves, but it does not go back and delete what it said.
Then read Psalm 88 in full. It has complaint and request, but it never reaches a line of praise. It ends in darkness. Its place in Scripture means a lament that does not resolve is still a prayer. You will need that freedom this week, because some days you will not reach the third part honestly.
Watch a prophet say it to God’s face
Read Jeremiah 20:1-18. In verses 1-2 a temple official beats Jeremiah and puts him in the stocks for prophesying. Then Jeremiah turns on God: “O LORD, thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived: thou art stronger than I, and hast prevailed: I am in derision daily, every one mocketh me” (Jeremiah 20:7).
Smith reads this as Jeremiah’s resignation speech and puts the prophet’s mood in plain words: “So I’m turning in my license. I’m through.” Then comes verse 9: “Then I said, I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his name. But his word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay” (Jeremiah 20:9).
Underline the place in verse 9 where Jeremiah tries to stop speaking for God, then the place where he cannot. His anger and his calling sit in one sentence. That is the anger this guide is about: aimed straight at God, and still holding on to him. Read on to verses 13-14, where praise is followed at once by a curse on the day of his birth. The chapter does not resolve neatly, and your week may not either.
What God already knows
Smith’s starting text is Psalm 139, where the psalmist describes God knowing a thought before it is fully formed. Verse 4 states it directly: “For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O LORD, thou knowest it altogether” (Psalm 139:4).
Follow the logic, because the whole practice rests on it. God’s knowledge of your anger does not wait on your saying it. So the polite prayer is not shielding God from anything. Silence changes nothing about what he knows. It only decides whether you will stand openly inside a truth he already sees, or keep pretending in front of him. Smith imagines God answering the person who finally confesses: “Get it outta you. I already know what’s in you before you say it.” He reasons from parenthood: “How can I be a parent and say to one of my children, look, there’s something we can’t talk about.”
He also observes that “we use all these nice phrases” when we pray carefully, naming attributes like omnipotence and immutability. The sentence a hurting person may actually need is simpler: “Tell him I’m mad at you.”
Lisa Fields adds why speaking matters for the one praying: “you have to get it out of your mouth to get it out of your heart.” She warns what happens otherwise: “And if you don’t put language to it, it will stay in your heart and it’ll eat you alive.” That is why the practice below is spoken aloud. Thinking the anger silently is not the same as addressing it to God.
Test it: toward God, or around him?
A fair objection deserves a hearing. Doesn’t the Bible warn about anger? Read Ephesians 4:26-31. Verse 26 says “Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath,” and verse 31 tells believers to put away bitterness, wrath and malice.
Two observations keep this honest. Paul is writing about anger between members of a church, so applying it to anger at God is an analogy, not the verse’s direct subject. And verse 26 assumes anger will come, then limits how long it is left alone. The danger is anger that sits overnight and hardens into bitterness. Smith’s reading is that “something has to be done with anger,” and he says “God will take that anger and recycle it.”
That gives you a test for the week. Anger can move toward God, as in Psalm 13 and Jeremiah 20, where the complaint is spoken to him. Or it can circle around him: rehearsed to yourself, voiced only to other people, or turned into a reason to stop praying. The first is lament. The second is where bitterness grows. Scripture also shows that an angry prayer can be wrong in what it says. In Jonah 4:4 God questions his angry prophet. Bringing anger to God does not make every accusation in it true. It means God is the one you bring it to, and he is free to answer.
The practice: seven days of honest lament
Pick the same ten minutes each day, somewhere you can speak aloud without being overheard. Use the shape of Psalm 13 as a scaffold, not a script.
- Address him. Begin by naming God personally. Smith notes that in Mark 15:34, as Jesus cried the words of Psalm 22, “he held onto that possessive pronoun.” Jesus prayed “My God,” not a distant title. Start there even if it is the only true thing you can say.
- Say the complaint. Speak your own “how long” in one or two plain sentences. Use your words, not religious ones. If you would never say it in church, that may be the sentence you need.
- Make one request. Ask for something specific, the way Psalm 13:3 does. It can be small.
- Trust, or leave it open. If you can honestly say a line of trust, say it. If you cannot, stop after the request, as Psalm 88 does. Do not manufacture a happy ending for God’s sake.
- Stay quiet for two minutes. You are not waiting for the feeling to leave. You are practicing remaining with God after saying the hard thing.
Each day, write down one sentence only: the complaint you spoke. By the end of the week you will have seven sentences you said to God’s face.
Add two variations. On day three, pray Jeremiah 20:7-9 aloud, then pray it again in your own words. On day five, read Psalm 62:8, “Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us.” Ask yourself whether pouring out and trusting feel like opposites to you, and why.
Keep your expectations honest. A week is a practice, not a timetable for healing. Smith described the change in his own anger after his son was murdered: “It was not instantaneously, it was gradually.” He also said, “Time doesn’t heal all wounds.” When a grieving student asked him, “doc, how can I pray to a God who has hurt me?” his counsel was permission, not explanation: “Tell God what you want, tell him, tell him. It’s all right.”
Gathering as a group
If you are leading, read the Scripture aloud together and let the observation tasks do the work. No one should be asked to repeat a private prayer. Invite people to talk about what they noticed, not what they confessed. Some will be grieving a recent loss, so let silence run long and resist answering pain with a verse. If someone is carrying more than a group can hold, follow up privately and encourage them toward a pastor or a trained counselor. Seeking that help is not a failure of faith. If anyone speaks of wanting to end their life, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text.
Questions to discuss
- Where do the rules about praying in anger come from in the communities you know? Are they ever stated aloud, or only modeled?
- Psalm 13 gives the complaint as much room as the trust. What would change in how you pray if you gave yourself the same proportion?
- In Jeremiah 20:9, the prophet cannot stop speaking for God even while accusing him. Does that make his anger look more faithful or less faithful to you? Why?
- Smith says, “God is not fragile, he’s faithful.” How does what you believe about God’s strength shape what you feel free to say to him?
- How would you tell whether you are speaking anger to God or rehearsing it about God?
- Jonah’s anger was questioned by God. Can a prayer be honest and still mistaken? What should someone do with that possibility?
- Psalm 88 ends without resolution. Does it comfort you or unsettle you that it is in the Bible?
At the end of the week
Smith put the deepest version of this simply: “If I know who, I don’t have to know why.” The week will probably not give you the why. But each day began with the who, a person you addressed as your God before you said anything hard to him.
Now take out the page from the first day. Lay your seven complaint sentences beside the rule you wrote. Did the thing you feared happen? Write a new version of the rule, one sentence long, that you now think is closer to true. Even if you change only one word, you have changed what you believe about the God you were speaking to.