You Are Allowed to Pray Like This: Sixty Laments for Grief, Doubt, and the Silence of God - Couverture souple

Janse Van Rensburg, Dr Michael

Couverture souple

ISBN 13 : 9798172718984

Editeur : Independently published, 2026

Synopsis

There is a prayer in the Bible that ends badly.

Psalm 88 runs for eighteen verses and never turns. No rescue. No lesson. It ends: darkness is my closest friend.

Somebody with the authority to decide what belonged in Scripture looked at a prayer with no hope in it — and did not take it out.

This book is sixty prayers in that tradition.

They are written for the woman on the bathroom floor after another negative test. The man in the hospital car park who cannot turn the key. The daughter whose mother has started calling her by the wrong name. The father whose son is polite about faith now, which is worse than angry. The person who says "good, thanks" in a church foyer eleven days after the funeral.

Not written about those people. Written as them, in the first person, so that on the day you have no words of your own, you can pick one up and use it.

Fourteen of them do not turn.

They do not arrive at hope. They do not close with a verse. They complain, they accuse, and they stop — the way Psalm 88 stops. They are not marked. You will not know until you reach the end of one, and by then you will already be inside it.

That is deliberate. A book of laments that resolves every time is not a book of laments. It is a book of reassurances with some sadness at the front, and it teaches you something false: that the pain is a stage you pass through on the way to the point. For some griefs that is true. For others it is a lie — and being handed that lie by a Christian book is its own injury.

Inside you will find:

• Sixty original laments in the language of the Psalms, in plain modern English
• Ten themed parts — your own body, watching someone go, your children, love, work and money, the inner life, God Himself, parents and time, the world, and the griefs nobody can see
• Ten closing prayers that argue with God about the design of creation itself, in the tradition of Abraham at Sodom, Job demanding a hearing, Habakkuk on his watchtower, and Jacob refusing to let go
• An index of situations, so that on the day you need one you can find it in seconds
• The sixty Scriptures these prayers stand on, gathered at the back

Written by a theologian from inside it, not afterwards. Dr Michael Janse van Rensburg holds a doctorate in theology — a qualification that turned out to be no protection at all when the thing he had written about academically arrived in his own house.

If you have run out of the language you were given. If every true thing anyone says lands like a stone. If you are tired of being told that your season is coming, that God has a plan, that everything happens for a reason — and you are still awake at three in the morning with something enormous and unsayable in your chest.

There is precedent for what you want to say. A great deal of it. It is bound into the middle of the book we call holy, and it has been waiting there the whole time for somebody to need it.

You are allowed to pray like this.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Independently published
• Date d'édition: 2026
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 13: 9798172718984
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 180
• Coordonnées du fabricant: Printed by Amazon on behalf of the author; https://www.amazon.fr/hz/contact-us; ; c/o Amazon Media EU S.à.r.l., 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy; Luxembourg; L-1855; Luxembourg