In this final week of Lent, Holy Week, we really settle into what we’ve been preparing ourselves for since Ash Wednesday: the silence of Good Friday and Holy Saturday. The questions that, for a time, went unanswered. The injustice and cruelty that couldn’t be undone. The cavern of grief and loss, of betrayal and failure. The abandonment, the forsakenness.

All this we find in the brutally honest questions posed in Psalm 88. Jesus may have prayed the words of Psalm 22 on the cross, saying “Why have you forsaken me?” but his words also allude to this other Psalm that also cries out from a place of grief, suffering, and a sense of abandonment. While Psalm 22 turns at the end toward praise and hope, Psalm 88 sits longer with the questions, which are never answered or tied up with a neat bow.

Life doesn't always work like that ~ at least, not right away. The hope, though, can be found in the fact that these questions are put into words as a prayer ~ posed to a God who may not answer right away, but who is listening, and who tends to our pain and suffering, and who will remain long after those questions subside.

So this Holy Week, we take courage to sit in the silence with our unanswered questions. We sit in silence with the God of our salvation.

You can find lyrics, scores/books, mp3s, CDs for God of My Salvation.

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