Hey, Bridgetown Church and to any and all of you listening online, John Mark Comer here with the Bridgetown Daily for Wednesday, June 10th.

Today is my 40th birthday, which is kind of cool, but it's a very interesting moment for me.

It's a bit hard for me to celebrate that moment and I like I want to come back to it in a few weeks later when the time is right.

Because right now we are in the middle of our week of lament.

Thank you to my dear friend Dave for the last day or two on the Bridgetown Daily and his wisdom and insight.

And he's just one of the best pastors I know and my best friend.

And so grateful for that and go back and give it a listen if you missed the last few days.

And I don't have very much to say today at all for kind of just our prayer for the day.

I just want to read a Psalm of lament. I've said this quite a few times that two thirds of the Psalms, which are have been called by scholars, the prayer book of the Bible, fall into the category of lament.

Lament is how we pray when our prayers go unanswered. It's how we it's less praying and it's more it's more just processing our raw, honest, deep visceral emotions before God.

And we almost invent them in a way so to speak at not at God per se, but at least to God and let him take all of our emotion and our doubt and our fear and our rage or whatever it is that your apathy, whatever it is that you're feeling and let him purify it and sift through it and get our flesh out of it and then channel it into change in the world through prayer and through embodied action in days and weeks and years to come.

And the Psalms are really the best template I have or liturgy I know of to follow to kind of coax my soul through the art of lament.

And so today I just want to read Psalm 10 over you, which is a raw emotional prayer of lament over injustice in a city and a nation.

And it feels very fitting to me for our time. And then right after I'm done reading Ziggy's coming on to play just a little rendition of the song prayers of the people by the brilliance last Tuesday in our kind of morning prayer time for our day of prayer and fasting and that was a day we set aside for lament as well.

We were just praying and processing over the last few weeks of injustice and the unrest in our city. And at one point in Ziggy just started to sing this song and it just did something to me at a deep soul level.

The chorus is just Lord have mercy Christ have mercy and I can't really think of a more simple but yet more deep and genuine way to pray.

So let me read Psalm 10 and I just invite you to take a deep breath. Let the Psalmist guide your mind and guide your heart and even guide your body as we pray as we set our body before God is a living sacrifice.

As we feel and we meet in our body the reality of our emotions and the reality of the time that we are living through.

Psalm 10.

Why Lord do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?

In his arrogance the wicked man hunts down the weak who are caught in the schemes he devises. He boasts about the cravings of his heart. He blesses the greedy and reviles the Lord.

In his pride the wicked man does not seek him in all his thoughts there is no room for God. His ways are always prosperous your laws are rejected by him.

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