The news alert comes in the middle of something ordinary. Not guilty. You read it twice. Maybe your chest goes tight, or your face gets hot, or you feel nothing at all and that scares you more. In September 2017, people in St. Louis had that moment when a judge found officer Jason Stockley not guilty of first degree murder in the 2011 shooting death of Anthony Lamar Smith. Many of them felt grief and anger they did not know how to pray.
The question here is how to keep walking with God on a day like that. The answer Scripture offers is lament: honest prayer that brings the anger and grief to God instead of hiding them or acting them out. Over the next pages you will read Psalm 13 and Psalm 94 slowly, hear from a pastor who was in the St. Louis streets that week, and then take one week of short morning and evening prayers. You can do this alone with a notebook, or with a small group that meets at the start and end of the week. Nothing you write has to be shared.
Before you open the Bible
Take a blank page. Write down what you feel about the verdict, in whatever words come. Do not clean it up or add the sentence you think a mature Christian should add at the end. If you feel numb, write that.
Then look at what you wrote and notice one thing: who is it addressed to? Many people write about God, or about the judge, or about the people celebrating. Few write to God. Keep the page. You will come back to it at the end of the week.
A prayer that does not wait for composure
Psalm 13 is short, six verses of Hebrew poetry. It is a lament, a kind of prayer the Psalms use again and again. It does not explain suffering. It speaks to God from inside it. Read it aloud if you can.
“How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me? How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart daily? how long shall mine enemy be exalted over me?”
Those are Psalm 13:1-2. The question “how long” comes four times before any request is made. The writer is not corrected for asking. The prayer was kept and sung.
Look at one phrase in verse 2: “take counsel in my soul.” In older English, to take counsel is to deliberate, to turn something over and over. The picture is a person working the problem alone, every day, with sorrow sitting in the chest. Anyone who has replayed a news clip twenty times knows that state. The psalm counts it as part of the pain.
Verse 4 adds a fear that will sound familiar after a verdict like this. The writer asks God to act “Lest mine enemy say, I have prevailed against him” (Psalm 13:4). Part of the grief is watching the wrong side seem to win, and hearing them say so.
Then the turn: “But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation” (Psalm 13:5). Read the tenses. “I have trusted” looks back. “Shall rejoice” looks ahead. The present moment, still full of sorrow, is never called happy. The writer leans on trust already given and joy not yet felt. You can pray verse 5 before you feel any peace at all.
The psalm also does not say how long David waited between verse 4 and verse 5. Poetry compresses time. It is not a schedule for your grief.
When the wrong comes through the law itself
Some pain after a verdict is ordinary grief. Some is sharper: the sense that the system meant to protect people has done the harm. Psalm 94 speaks to that.
It asks, “LORD, how long shall the wicked, how long shall the wicked triumph?” (Psalm 94:3). Later it asks, “Shall the throne of iniquity have fellowship with thee, which frameth mischief by a law?” (Psalm 94:20). In plain English: could God ever side with a seat of power that uses law to do harm? The next verse describes people who “condemn the innocent blood” (Psalm 94:21). This is a prayer about injustice carried out through legal process.
The psalm opens by handing judgment to God: “O LORD God, to whom vengeance belongeth; O God, to whom vengeance belongeth, shew thyself” (Psalm 94:1). The writer is furious, and he tells the anger to the one who judges. He does not appoint himself the avenger. That is the shape the week below will follow.
What one pastor carried that week
In a Jude 3 Project conversation recorded five days after the verdict, Dr. Vince Bantu spoke as a St. Louis pastor who had joined the protests most nights. He was not describing other people’s pain from a distance. He said he had “been, and am still sometimes the victim of police discrimination myself.” That matters for anyone leading others through a day like this. Some people carry a verdict as news. Others carry it as a reminder of their own encounters, and their grief has a personal memory inside it.
He described downtown late at night, after most protesters had gone home and lines of officers were marching through the streets: “And it felt like a police state. It felt like a military state downtown.” That is his account of what he saw, not a finding of fact. What it shows is how fear compounds grief. A person can leave a protest more afraid than when they arrived, and that fear belongs in the prayer too, in the language of Psalm 13:2, sorrow in the heart daily.
Bantu named another layer. Talking with young people in the streets, he said, “I’m hearing their just visceral anger at the church.” Some of what you feel may land there, on churches that seemed silent or quick to ask for calm. Psalm 13 has no clause that exempts the church from complaint. You can say that to God plainly.
He did not treat prayer as optional. “yes, we need to pray, amen. We need to get together and pray and have prayer services, but then we need to pray with our feet and call for systemic change.” Notice his order. The prayer service is affirmed and then extended. For someone in grief, that suggests a test: does my praying make me more able to go toward other hurting people, or does it become a place to hide from them?
And he kept a way of seeing people whose choices he criticized. Of young activists in his city, many of whom wanted nothing to do with church, he said, “I see them as lost children that need our guidance and need us to come alongside them.” Anger that lasts for weeks tends to sort everyone into allies and enemies. Bantu’s sentence refuses that sorting even toward people he disagreed with. It is worth praying through slowly, because it is hard.
Three honest objections
Some Christians will say anger at a court is unspiritual. Paul calls the governing authority “the minister of God to thee for good” (Romans 13:4). Should a believer simply accept the ruling? But the same verse explains that the authority exists to punish evil. That is the standard Psalm 94 holds a failing court to. Respecting legitimate authority and grieving a wrong it commits are both possible, and the Psalms practice the second openly.
Others will say lament is too slow, and that prayer without action keeps people comfortable. That is a fair worry, and Bantu shared it. But the week below asks you to move toward grieving people by day four. Lament done honestly tends to produce action, and it makes that action less likely to come from despair.
The hardest objection is personal: what if your judgment of the verdict is wrong, or partial? You probably did not sit through the trial. You may have heard one side’s summary. The people who saw it the other way are not all acting in bad faith. Lament can hold that uncertainty. You can grieve a death and the fear it stirred while admitting you do not know everything the judge knew. James says, “let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath: For the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God” (James 1:19-20). And Psalm 139 gives words for honesty about yourself: “Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts” (Psalm 139:23). Praying Psalm 94 does not require certainty about the case. It asks God, who sees what every court misses, to judge rightly. That is a prayer you can pray with integrity whatever the facts turn out to be.
A week of lament
Each day has a short morning prayer and a short evening question. Ten minutes is plenty. If you miss a day, pick up the next one.
- Day one. Morning: read Psalm 13:1-2 aloud. Write your own “how long,” one sentence, addressed to God. Evening: where did your mind keep returning today? Write it down without judging it.
- Day two. Morning: read Psalm 94:1-7. Tell God plainly what you want him to judge. Evening: did anger push you toward anything you regret? Tell God that too.
- Day three. Morning: read Psalm 13:3-4. Name the fear underneath your anger. Evening: who else is grieving this? Pray for them by name, or by description if you do not know names.
- Day four. Morning: read Romans 12:15, “Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep.” Evening: take one small step toward someone who is weeping. A message, a visit, a meal, a phone call.
- Day five. Morning: read Psalm 139:23-24. Ask God to show you anything in your reaction that is unfair or partial. Evening: write one way you could pray with your feet that you can actually do and that fits Scripture.
- Day six. Morning: read Psalm 13:5. Write down one specific time you have already trusted God’s mercy. Just remember it. Evening: rest. Do something that restores you.
- Day seven. Morning: read all of Psalm 13 again. Evening: return to the page you wrote before the week began. Who is it addressed to now? What, if anything, has changed?
Questions for one person or a circle
- When you first heard the verdict, what did you do with your reaction in the first hour? What does that tell you about where you usually take grief?
- Psalm 13 asks “how long” four times before it asks for anything. What happens in a prayer when you skip that part?
- Psalm 94 hands vengeance to God. Is that a relief to you, a frustration, or both?
- Is any part of your anger aimed at the church? What would it look like to bring that to God honestly?
- What parts of your view of the verdict are you sure of, and what parts are you less sure of? How does that change your prayer?
- What step toward someone who is grieving could you take this week, and what makes it hard?
If you are gathering others
Expect the room to hold very different histories. Some may have personal experience with police, courts, or a death that echoes this case. Others may be unsure what they think about the verdict. Let both be present without turning the meeting into a retrial of the facts.
Read the psalms aloud and leave silence afterward. Anyone may pass on any question. Do not ask people to read their written prayers. If someone chooses to, listen without correcting or fixing.
Grief and anger sometimes go deeper than a week of prayer can carry. Seeing a counselor or clinician is a faithful way to care for the mind God gave you. If anyone says they are thinking about ending their life, stay with them and contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988.
Psalm 13 ends with a song: “I will sing unto the LORD, because he hath dealt bountifully with me” (Psalm 13:6). It takes the psalm six verses to get there. Your lament may take much longer, and the verdict may never feel right. You can still pray the first verse today.