I Poured Out My Complaint Before Him, and He Was in a Cave

There is a stage in a long trouble that nobody warns anybody about, and it arrives around year three.

It is the stage where the people stop asking.

Not because they stopped caring. Because there is nothing new, and they have already said the useful things, and a person cannot keep asking about a situation that never has an update without both of them feeling worse afterward.

So the asking tapers off. And the person carrying it starts giving the short version, because the short version is kinder to everybody, and the short version becomes the only version, and eventually there is no long version anywhere.

A woman told me she had not told anybody the whole thing in about four years, and then she said the sentence that made me write this. She said: I do not think I could remember all of it now if somebody asked.

Where that psalm was written

The hundred and forty-second psalm carries a note about its setting, and the setting is the point.

A prayer when he was in the cave. That is a man hiding, with a price on him, in a hole in the ground, and it is one of the least dignified stretches of David's life.

And here is what he does in there.

I poured out my complaint before him; I shewed before him my trouble. (Psalm 142:2, King James Version)

Poured out. That is not a summary word. It is a word for emptying a vessel completely, and it is the opposite of the short version.

And then the second clause, which is stranger than it looks. I shewed before him my trouble. He showed it. He laid it out in front of God as an object, in detail, and Scripture kept the record of him doing it.

You have somewhere the long version is still welcome, and the psalm uses a word for emptying a container rather than for summarizing (Psalm 142:2), and the Spirit is the one who makes a full telling possible in a person who has been giving the short one for four years.

He also says the thing about nobody

And two verses later he says the part that made me certain this psalm belongs in this article.

I looked on my right hand, and beheld, but there was no man that would know me: refuge failed me; no man cared for my soul. (Psalm 142:4)

No man that would know me. Refuge failed me.

That is not a fair description of David's life, incidentally. He had people. He had men with him in that cave, and the record says so a few chapters earlier.

Which tells you something important. That sentence is not an accurate audit of his support network. It is what being in a cave for a long time feels like, and Scripture kept it in the shape he said it, without correcting the arithmetic.

You are not required to be fair to everybody in your own account of it, and the psalm keeps a sentence that overstates the loneliness (Psalm 142:4). The Spirit is the one who receives a thing said in the temperature it was actually felt at.

The woman at Shiloh does the same thing

There is one other person in Scripture described as pouring something out in prayer, and the detail around it is worth having.

Hannah is praying at the tabernacle, silently, with her lips moving, and the priest assumes she is drunk and says so. And her answer is one of the plainest sentences in the Old Testament.

No, my lord, I am a woman of a sorrowful spirit... but have poured out my soul before the LORD. (1 Samuel 1:15)

Poured out my soul. Same image. And she says it to a man who has just misjudged her badly, without any embarrassment about what she was doing.

And notice that nobody in that account tells her she was doing it wrong. Eli corrects himself and blesses her, and the text moves on.

What she was doing looked, from outside, like a woman who had lost her composure in a public place. Scripture calls it prayer and puts her son's whole story on the far side of it.

You are not obliged to look composed while you do this, and the account that names it prayer describes something that a bystander misread entirely (1 Samuel 1:15), and it is His Spirit who is present in a thing that would embarrass a person if anybody walked in.

You are doing something Scripture describes twice and names approvingly both times (1 Samuel 1:15), and that part belongs to the Holy Spirit, who gives a person permission to empty a thing out that they have been rationing for years.

And this belongs here plainly, because this category reaches people in real danger. Where somebody has run out of people and the trouble has become dangerous, the answer is not only a prayer. Tell a person today: a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, somebody who can sit with you, or call the 988 crisis line, in the United States. Going is strength, and running out of listeners is exactly when it matters most.