“Help! Help! Please, help!” she cried as she ran through the snow toward our car.
I had seen the headlights of a vehicle tipped on its side about 20 feet from the small highway road southeast of Mt. Hood and had turned around to see if any assistance was needed. It was.
“My friend is pinned under the truck,” the young woman said, panic in her voice. “It’s crushing her.”
Immediately, my boys and I began to run, covering the span quickly. My wife, the young woman (Nicole), my boys, and I pushed on the roof of the huge 4×4 pick-up, hoping somehow to flip it over. But we five weren’t strong enough by far. Still, we succeeded in relieving the weight from the young woman (Bailey) trapped underneath.
It was obvious we couldn’t hold it for long. So, I sent Nicole, my wife, and my 14-year-old son in search of something to wedge under the truck.
But as soon as the others left my 17-year-old and me to hold up the truck, Bailey underneath began to scream.
“It’s crushing me! It’s crushing my neck!”
And so we threw ourselves into pushing back the truck again. But every time our energy waned, Bailey would scream about the crushing pain.
“I don’t want to die” she said over and over and over again, crying as she did so. “Please, don’t let me die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.”
My wife tried her cell phone to see if she could call 911, but we were in a no service area that stretched for miles in either direction. And the search for things to wedge under the truck came up empty. Snow covered everything nearby, so no rocks or chunks of wood could be seen. And nothing could be found in our car. I might have been able to find the jack myself, but I was busy holding a truck barely above a young woman’s neck and couldn’t help find it.
Only a few cars went by, none stopping to help. A truck driver rolled down his window and offered to call 911 when he got cell service again. That was somewhat helpful, but it didn’t meet our pressing need.
Two months earlier, I had been called into the hospital where I work as a chaplain. A young couple had rolled their truck off a highway in similar circumstances. In that case, too, the driver had ended up pinned under the truck. No emergency help arrived for a hour and the young woman died in the hospital from her injuries.
That story was in the front of my mind as I strained against the truck, praying to God that I not run out of energy and let it crush Bailey to death.
“Lord, please don’t let me fail here. Please don’t let her die because I can’t hold up this truck any longer.”
It was a full ten minutes according to my wife before another car stopped with two men in it. It took them what felt like forever to understand the gravity of the situation. But they eventually joined us at the truck. We pushed together, and Nicole was able to help Bailey get out from underneath.
She was saved.
Now, I’m not so interested in my part in the story, though it’s the only part I experienced. What I’m most interested in is Bailey’s part.
Her whole life focused in on one overwhelming reality: If the truck crushed her, she would die.
There are times in our lives when we feel the same, even if we aren’t in any immediate physical danger. We feel an uncontrollable weight crushing us and it seems as if we will die without some urgent help. In fact, the Psalms are filled with the prayers of those who feel like they’re being crushed.
I tell the above story because if vividly describes in a true story what we feel metaphorically.
Psalm 88 is the prayer of a soul being crushed. It’s first word is Yahweh, but it’s last word is darkness. It is the prayer of a soul pinned beneath a truck, feeling the weight of death pressing down.
LORD, you are the God who saves me;
day and night I cry out to you.
May my prayer come before you;
turn your ear to my cry (Ps. 88:1-2).
The most basic human situation is helplessness. Unlike most animals which are on their feet and taking care of themselves within seconds or days, we humans require years of care before we’re able to venture out on your own. We are completely unique in this helplessness — it’s a defining feature of who we are — and yet we try to pretend we’ve got everything under control.
But Heman, the writer of Psalm 88, doesn’t pretend. He knows he needs help. He knows he needs to be saved. And so he prays. “Help!” is one of our most basic and honest prayers.
And what Heman is afraid of is death.
I am overwhelmed with troubles
and my life draws near to death.
I am counted among those who go down to the pit;
I am like one without strength.
I am set apart with the dead,
like the slain who lie in the grave,
whom you remember no more,
who are cut off from your care (Ps. 88:3-5).
Like the young woman beneath the truck, death is on Heman’s mind. He feels it pressing in on him so heavily, it feels to him like he’s ready to be lined up at the morgue and buried six feet under.
Sometimes, we’re so low we can’t get any lower. As the old Mike Doughty song put it, “I feel like I am looking at the world from the bottom of a well.”
But wait. It’s actually possible to get lower than that. What if it’s God himself who’s put us in this bad spot?
You have put me in the lowest pit,
in the darkest depths.
Your wrath lies heavily on me;
you have overwhelmed me with all your waves.
You have taken from me my closest friends
and have made me repulsive to them.
I am confined and cannot escape;
my eyes are dim with grief (Ps. 88:6-9).
Heman points the finger directly at God. He unloads accusation on top of accusation. God is to blame and no one else. Unlike other psalms, there are no “enemies” in Psalm 88. There’s just God and the friends God turned against Heman.
Is Heman right? Did God do all these things? Did God’s anger get away from him so that he crushed Heman? Did he relentlessly pummel him with wave after wave of angry torment? Did he do a Pied Piper on Heman’s friends, luring them away and then turning them against him?
Did God put young Bailey under the truck on that icy night?
And what does God think about such accusing statements and questions?
The answer to that last question is: God must think they’re OK, since he put these accusations and questions in the Bible.
God can handle our hardest questions and our most pain-filled, bitter accusations. He is well-acquainted with the pain behind our words. In fact, rather than being offended by our accusations, God wants us to pray them rather than to silently seethe our way into atheism.
One of the main pathways into atheism is unprayed pain. An unwillingness to talk with God about our pain can easily become an unwillingness to talk with God at all.
If we find ourselves prayerless, taking time to look back on our lives to see if there have been painful times that are still unresolved with God can be a helpful exercise. A good mentor or spiritual director can be a great help in uncovering the roots of our silences.
But Heman doesn’t resort to silence. In fact, he turns up the volume, becoming philosophical with his questioning.
I call to you, LORD, every day;
I spread out my hands to you.
Do you show your wonders to the dead?
Do their spirits rise up and praise you?
Is your love declared in the grave,
your faithfulness in Destruction?
Are your wonders known in the place of darkness,
or your righteous deeds in the land of oblivion? (Ps. 88:9-12)
The basic question Heman wants to know the answer to is: If you kill your friends, God, how will you have any friends?
There are only the most basic hints at resurrection in the Hebrew Bible. It’s only in the New Testament and especially with the resurrection of Jesus that we get a full-fledged theology of life that extends beyond this current mortal life. So, when Heman questions the ability of the dead to praise God and to talk with one another about his wonders and his love, he’s thinking that death is the great silencer. And from a day-to-day, earthly perspective, it is. I haven’t heard from my Mom since she died.
So, the answer to each of Heman’s rhetorical questions is NO.
Because of this, Heman wants to know why God would snuff out his friends (like Heman himself), since it snuffs out their relationship. It’s a great way to lose worshipers, not gain them.
To this, Psalm 88 offers no response except to ask another question.
But I cry to you for help, LORD;
in the morning my prayer comes before you.
Why, LORD, do you reject me
and hide your face from me? (Ps. 88:13-14)
This is a far more personal and painful a question. Heman is no longer rhetorical, he’s personally offended.
“I pray to you, Yahweh,” he says. “I’m faithful at it. In fact, that’s what I’m doing right now. So, how do you get off with being so impolite. I talk to you, but you turn the other way, ignoring me, pretending I don’t exist, and not saying a word in response. How does your conscious let you get away with that?”
Again, silence.
From my youth I have suffered and been close to death;
I have borne your terrors and am in despair.
Your wrath has swept over me;
your terrors have destroyed me.
All day long they surround me like a flood;
they have completely engulfed me (Ps. 88:15-17).
Heman turns up the volume yet again.
“It’s bad enough, God, that I’m suffering now,” he says, “but you’ve been pouring on pain my entire life without letup. I keep taking it and taking it and taking it, but it’s destroying me. Soon, there will be nothing left as I’m swallowed up in the black hole of your angry terror.”
And then he finishes with a dagger.
You have taken from me friend and neighbor —
darkness is my closest friend (Ps. 88:18).
“I have nothing left. I have no one left. You’ve robbed me of everything and everyone. If I can be said to have one last friend, it’d be darkness.”
But darkness is worse than nothingness. It’s chaotic. It’s soulless. It’s God-less. It’s what’s left over when all life has been sucked out. It is no friend, for darkness is friendlessness.
Wow.
This is what it is to be trapped under a truck. This is what it is to feel like I’m looking at the world from the bottom of a well.
All of life is reduced to the current moment. Every experience of God is reduced to the current experience that feels like rejection. Yes, it’s not an accurate reflection of God or of how God has treated us over our lives. But it is an accurate reflection of how it feels in the moment. And because of that, it is a perfectly valid and important prayer.
Oprah Winfrey has popularized the term “your truth,” as opposed to “the truth.” It’s an unfortunate and squishy term, but it does communicate that you and I experience reality differently. Bailey under the truck experienced that situation so differently than I did as I pushed against it. Her “truth” was that she was about to die.
Psalm 88 is the prayer we pray when being crushed by a truck. Hopefully, there are plenty of other prayers of gratitude and praise that follow when we get pulled out from underneath it, when our prayers are finally answered.
The most important thing is that we keep on praying.
Despite all of his pain and feelings of betrayal and abandonment, Heman kept on praying. If he hadn’t, we wouldn’t have Psalm 88. May we all reject atheism and keep praying, especially when we’re being crushed by a truck and the only friend we feel we’ve got left is darkness.