Excerpt from Praise Habit: Finding God in Sunsets and Sushi by David Crowder

^1-9 God, you're my last chance of the day.
I spend the night on my knees before you.
   Put me on your salvation agenda;
      take notes on the trouble I'm in.
   I've had my fill of trouble;
      I'm camped on the edge of hell.
   I'm written off as a lost cause,
      one more statistic, a hopeless case.
   Abandoned as already dead,
      one more body in a stack of corpses,
   And not so much as a gravestone—
      I'm a black hole in oblivion.
   You've dropped me into a bottomless pit,
      sunk me in a pitch-black abyss.
   I'm battered senseless by your rage,
      relentlessly pounded by your waves of anger.
   You turned my friends against me,
      made me horrible to them.
   I'm caught in a maze and can't find my way out,
      blinded by tears of pain and frustration.

 ^9-12 I call to you, God; all day I call.
      I wring my hands, I plead for help.
   Are the dead a live audience for your miracles?
      Do ghosts ever join the choirs that praise you?
   Does your love make any difference in a graveyard?
      Is your faithful presence noticed in the corridors of hell?
   Are your marvelous wonders ever seen in the dark,
      your righteous ways noticed in the Land of No Memory?

 ^13-18 I'm standing my ground, God, shouting for help,
      at my prayers every morning, on my knees each daybreak.
   Why, God, do you turn a deaf ear?
      Why do you make yourself scarce?
   For as long as I remember I've been hurting;
      I've taken the worst you can hand out, and I've had it.
   Your wildfire anger has blazed through my life;
      I'm bleeding, black-and-blue.
   You've attacked me fiercely from every side,
      raining down blows till I'm nearly dead.
   You made lover and neighbor alike dump me;
      the only friend I have left is Darkness.

Psalm 88 is this. A picture of a moment when life has pressed in and faith is turned on its head and the writer has been thrown into a deluge with the overpowering weight of the moment. Life cannot be kept at bay. It comes. Our protected areas are invaded. We cry for help and hear silence in return. I think the truth in this chapter is that sometimes we find ourselves overwhelmed with no answer. In this psalm there are no reasons given for God's silence. The psalm is not interested in explanation. We may imagine that the situation is so desperate that even if a "reason" could be offered, the speaker would have no interest in it, nor would it help, because the needfulness of the moment supersedes any reasonable conversation. But the psalmist was not deterred by the silence. Even if the speaker is speaking to the empty sky. he is not deterred. It only leads to more intense address. This psalm reports what it's like to be God's partner in His inexplicable absence. There is nothing out of bounds, nothing precluded or inappropriate. Everything properly belongs in this conversation of the heart. To withhold parts of life from that conversation is to withhold parts of life from the sovereignty of God. God must be addressed even if God never answers. In our modern experience it is believed that enough power and knowledge can tame the terror and eliminate the darkness. But we regularly learn and discern that there in the darkness---more than anywhere else--newness that is not of our own making breaks upon us and we are surely then drowned in Him. Psalm 88 shows us what the cross is about: faithfulness in scenes of complete abandonment.