Most tired believers never announce that they are done with God. They simply stop expecting him to answer, and a tarot app or a manifesting routine starts to look like a way to get some movement. If you have prayed for a marriage, a child, a healing or a way out of money trouble and the answer has not come, this study offers an alternative with deep roots in Scripture: tell God the truth about how tired you are, then practice waiting on him without pretending the wait is easy.
You can work through it alone over a week or use it for one or two group sessions. Each section starts with something to observe or do, and the practice in the middle is meant to be carried out, not only read. Nothing here requires you to share your answers. In a group, people should feel free to pass.
Begin with your own sentence
On the Jude 3 Project podcast, Lisa Fields describes women raised in church whose lives did not turn out as they expected. Some married young and are now divorcing. Some never married, and she describes their prayer this way: “God, how long?” She sums up the disappointment underneath it: “I did the things the Godly way and my life didn’t turn out the way I wanted it to turn out.” Later she voices the conclusion some of these women reach: “this don’t seem to be working for me.”
Before reading further, write your own version of that sentence. Keep it to one line and make it specific. Skip general lines such as God feels distant. Write what you have been asking for and roughly how long you have been asking. Then underline the word that carries the most feeling.
Dr. Sarita Lyons, who directs discipleship and women’s ministry at Epiphany Fellowship Church in Philadelphia, responds to Lisa Fields’s phrase by pointing to what usually goes unexamined: “I don’t think people have really interrogated their motivation.” Your sentence starts that examination. It shows what you hoped faith would do for you.
Read Psalm 13 as a prayer someone actually prayed
Psalm 13 is poetry, a prayer offered to God. Read it as a model of honest speech, not as a command or a promise. Read it aloud once, slowly. Here is Psalm 13:1-2:
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?
The phrase “how long” appears four times in those two verses. It is the same question Lisa Fields hears from women in her own circle, and the Bible does not treat it as off-limits. Notice also “take counsel in my soul.” In plainer English, the writer has been turning the problem over alone, day after day. In verses 3-4 he asks God to consider him, hear him and lighten his eyes, because he fears death and fears his enemy gloating over his collapse.
Then comes the turn, in Psalm 13:5-6: “But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation. I will sing unto the LORD, because he hath dealt bountifully with me.”
Read verses 4 and 5 again and ask: does the psalm say the situation changed between them? The text never reports an answer arriving. What changes is where the writer sets his weight. He has not been rescued yet. He remembers God’s mercy and decides to trust it while the “how long” is still open.
That detail keeps the practice honest. Lament is not a technique for getting God to act faster. It is a way of staying in conversation with him while he has not yet acted. Does that make the psalm more believable to you, or harder to pray? Why?
Venting and anchoring
Lyons points to this same pattern in David’s psalms. She observes that “David would have this kind of despairing negative intro to his psalm, and then he said, but I trust him.” Then she names the two movements this guide will practice: “He’s able to vent and ventilate his soul by being honest, but then also anchor his soul in the truth of what he knows about God.”
Anchoring without venting produces a polite faith that smiles through disappointment until it quietly gives out. Venting without anchoring produces a complaint that never reaches the truth about God. The psalm holds both, in that order.
Lyons is candid about why many church women never learned the first half. “We have given people a faith that couldn’t wrestle,” she says, and she argues that churches have made seasons of disillusionment and despair seem incompatible with discipleship. She counters that the great figures of Scripture went through ebbs and flows, questioning and wrestling with God. If you were taught that a faithful woman does not say “how long” out loud, Psalm 13 gives you permission from the Bible itself.
Two questions are worth pausing on here. Which half comes less naturally to you, venting honestly or anchoring in what you know about God, and what did you learn growing up that might explain it? And for a group: What would a church need to change for “how long” to be something people could say out loud there?
Test it against the shortcut
The appeal of a shortcut gets clearer beside lament. Lyons describes the hope a tired person brings to a reading or a crystal: “somehow I will get answers for where God has not spoken.” She also voices the prayer behind a vision board treated as a guarantee: “God, I did my vision board. I have been telling you who I wanna be, what I want, and when I want it.”
Lament keeps asking God the question and lets him remain God. A tarot spread or a manifesting routine tries to answer the question without him, or to set the timing yourself. Lyons describes New Age practice as an alternative to the wait, and Exodus 32:1 shows how old that move is. Israel acted “when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down out of the mount.” They did not set out to abandon God. They wanted something they could see and direct while the delay went on.
This is why the question of motive matters more than the object on the shelf. Jude 3 Project holds that the line is intent: sage burned for its smell or a crystal kept because it is beautiful is not a spiritual practice, but using these things, or astrology, manifestation and divination, to reach spiritual power, guidance or destiny apart from God does not fit with following Jesus. Scripture’s own warning runs in the same direction. Deuteronomy 18:10-12 forbids divination, observing times, enchantment and consulting spirits, because Israel was to seek guidance from the Lord. Thoughtful Christians still draw edge cases differently, such as whether glancing at a horoscope for fun is harmless or already a small step toward trusting it. Lyons’s question cuts through those cases: what were you hoping the practice would do for you?
Now take the strongest objection seriously. Someone worn down by years of obedience might say: You are telling me to wait longer and call it spiritual. A reading at least feels like doing something. That deserves a real answer, not a scolding. Lament is doing something. It is speech, and it is active. In Psalm 27:14, waiting is paired with courage: “Wait on the LORD: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the LORD.” Waiting there is not resignation. Lyons adds a blunt warning about the alternatives: “the enemy always over promises and under delivers.” The shortcut feels like movement, but it cannot give what it promises.
She also reframes what fatigue signals. In faithfulness fatigue, she says, we need more rest in Christ and more help from the Lord, “where we just need to even own that we need support and help.” Exhaustion does not mean you should try harder alone. It means you are carrying something that needs to be shared with God and with people. Set a lament beside a manifesting routine. What does each assume about who controls the future?
The practice: a week of written lament
Set aside about fifteen minutes on four days this week. Use paper if you can. You will write one lament of your own, in the same order as Psalm 13.
- Day one: Address and complaint. Start with the line you wrote at the beginning. Speak it to God directly, using “you.” Then write out your own “how long” as plainly as the psalmist does. Use the words you actually feel, not the ones that sound acceptable. If anger shows up, let it stay on the page.
- Day two: What I reached for. Write down, without shame, anything you have used to manage the wait. It may be a tarot app or a horoscope. It may be endless scrolling, overwork or a vision board you started treating as a deal. Next to each one, write the question Lyons gives: “what does that say about where I lost confidence in the Lord?”
- Day three: Request. Psalm 13:3 asks God to “consider and hear me.” Write what you are asking God for. Then add one request that has nothing to do with the outcome, such as the ability to keep talking to him while you wait.
- Day four: Anchor. Write one sentence that begins “But I have trusted in” and finish it with something true about God’s character that does not depend on getting your request. Lyons grounds this in God’s love, saying “everything that he does is motivated by his love,” and in his knowledge of what we cannot see. Psalm 139:12 can help: “Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.” If the sentence feels hollow, write it anyway, and add a line saying so. That is still honest.
Lyons’s point about feelings matters most on day four. Speaking of God’s will when prayers go unanswered as hoped, she says “it may take us some time emotionally to catch up to that revelation, but we can have a changed mind and changed behavior even if our feelings are slow to process with that truth.” Where have you seen that hold true, in your own life or someone else’s, and where has it not?
At any point in the week, tell one safe person, a friend, a mentor, a pastor or a counselor, that you are in a season of faithfulness fatigue. You do not have to explain everything. Ask them to check in once before the week ends.
When the week is done, reread your opening line. Has the word you underlined changed? Has the sentence? Either answer is acceptable. The goal is not to feel better on schedule. It is to practice what Lyons calls “having the faith to live in the land of uncertainty.” What would honest waiting look like in your situation this month, as opposed to passive waiting or a shortcut?
If you are leading a group
When someone reads a raw lament, resist reaching right away for a verse that resolves it. Psalm 13 gives the complaint four questions of space before the turn, and your group can do the same. A simple thank-you is often the right response.
Make every written exercise private by default. Invite people to share one sentence if they want to, and make passing feel ordinary. Some in the room may be using the practices this guide discusses. Ask what they hoped those practices would give them before saying anything about the practices themselves.
Watch for exhaustion that has become something heavier. Lament does not replace care, and seeking therapy is not a failure of faith; God works through trained counselors and clinicians. If anyone describes hopelessness that has turned into thoughts of not wanting to live, connect them with help that day. In the US, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
Something to carry
Go back to the line you wrote at the start. Lisa Fields’s friends ask “God, how long?” The psalmist asked it four times, and nothing in the psalm says his circumstances changed. He ended by choosing to trust and sing. You do not have to reach the singing this week. The invitation is smaller: keep the question pointed at God rather than at something that promises a faster answer, and let one other person know you are asking it.