There is a particular kind of tiredness that comes from praying about the same thing for months and watching nothing change. Not dramatic. Not a crisis of faith you could name out loud. Just a slow, quiet suspicion that you might be talking to the ceiling.

If you have been there, or you are there now, Psalm 77 is going to feel uncomfortably current. This week Sharon Edmundson took us into it, and it turns out to be one of the most honest things in the Bible about what happens in your head when life stops going your way.

The psalm does not end with the problem solved. What changes by the end is not the writer's circumstances. It is where he has decided to look.

The battle you might not have noticed

Most of us think of a battle as something external. Ephesians 6:12 points somewhere else, describing a struggle that is "not against flesh and blood". So does 2 Corinthians 10, which talks about weapons that "have divine power to demolish strongholds" and about taking "captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ".

Whatever you make of the spiritual framing, the second part is hard to argue with. A lot of the battle happens in the mind.

The 2025 Mental Health Report, produced by Mind and the Centre for Mental Health, found that 1 in 5 adults in England are living with a common mental health problem. Among 16 to 24 year olds, mental ill health rose from 17.5% in 2007 to 25.8% in 2023 to 2024. That is roughly a quarter of young adults.

Jo Hargreaves, a Christian psychotherapist who works at the join between theology and therapy, describes the Bible as the most regulating book for our nervous system. Open it and you meet a God who says you were made deliberately and loved without conditions, that you are fully understood, and that He is patient, dependable and present. If what you believe about God, about yourself and about other people shapes how you act, then those are not small claims.

Hardship is a crossroads

Sharon described hard times as a crossroads. Not a test to pass. A junction.

When things are going badly, that is precisely when we are most vulnerable to believing something untrue about God. That He has lost interest. That He is angry. That He was never there. The pressure does not create the lie, it just makes it easier to swallow.

So the question at the junction is simple, even if the answer is not. Are we going to walk away from God, or towards Him?

Think about the last time you felt genuinely desperate. A health scare that rearranged your life. Pain that would not let up. A relationship that broke and stayed broken. Watching someone you love suffer. Hundreds of job applications and not one reply, until you start to wonder what is wrong with you. The specific loneliness of feeling that nobody actually understands.

Maybe that is a memory. Maybe that is this week.

A psalm written from rock bottom

Psalm 77 was written by a man called Asaph. Scholars are not agreed on which Asaph, whether the one from King David's time or a later writer during the Assyrian threat or around the exile in Babylon. Either way, he was not writing from a good week.

He opens like this.

I cried out to God for help. I cried out to God to hear me. When I was in distress, I sought the Lord. At night I stretched out untiring hands, and I would not be comforted. I remembered You, God, and I groaned. I meditated, and my spirit grew faint. You kept my eyes from closing. I was too troubled to speak. (Psalm 77:1-4)

Notice the shape of that. He starts with words. Then the words run out, and all he has left is groaning. Anyone who has been awake at three in the morning with something heavy will recognise the progression.

Which raises a question about how we comfort each other. Sharon listed a few things people say with genuinely good intentions, and which land like a brick.

• "Just trust God and it will all be okay"
• "Just think of all the people worse off than you"
• "It could be worse"
• "Look on the bright side"

Each one, however kindly meant, makes the other person's situation smaller than it is.

Why the stiff upper lip doesn't help

In the UK, particularly a generation or two back, the standard response to difficulty was to stay outwardly strong and keep the feelings out of sight. The stiff upper lip.

The Bible does not seem to recommend it. Lamentations 2:19 says the opposite, "Pour out your heart like water in the presence of the Lord."

Faith is not pretending everything is fine when it isn't. It is a relationship with a God who can handle honesty. Which also means it is not the same as distraction. Endless scrolling, another series, more work to avoid the quiet, none of that is faith either. It is just a way of not looking at the thing.

And Asaph does not hold back. He asks six questions in a row, and they are blunt.

Will the Lord reject forever? Will He never show His favour again? Has His unfailing love vanished forever? Has His promise failed for all time? Has God forgotten to be merciful? Has He in anger withheld His compassion? (Psalm 77:7-9)

Has God forgotten to be merciful. That is in the Bible. Nobody edited it out.

The turn

So what does he do with all of that?

Then I thought, to this I will appeal, the years when the Most High stretched out His right hand. I will remember the deeds of the Lord. Yes, I will remember Your miracles of long ago. (Psalm 77:10-11)

I will remember. It is a decision, not a feeling. He does not wait until he feels better and then think about God. He turns his attention deliberately, while everything still hurts.

What he turns to is the Exodus, God rescuing His people out of slavery in Egypt and making a way through the sea. And here is the detail that is easy to skip past. Asaph was not alive when it happened. He is drawing comfort from a story he only ever heard second hand.

Which is permission-giving. If you cannot find a moment in your own life where God showed up, you are allowed to lean on someone else's. This is part of why God kept telling His people to build memorials and to tell their children what had happened. Not sentiment. Supply lines.

What actually changes

Asaph never gets an answer to why he was suffering. The psalm offers no resolution, no explanation, no tidy ending. What he arrives at instead is God's character, remembered on purpose.

The last line of the psalm calls God a shepherd, leading His people "like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron". Much later Jesus picks up that same image and claims it directly. "I am the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd lays His life down for the sheep." (John 10:11)

Which is the answer the Old Testament could only gesture at. Not a God who explains suffering from a safe distance, but One who steps into it.

Something to do this week

There are three moves, taken straight from what Asaph does.

1. Run towards God, not away. The crossroads is real and you get to choose. Choosing badly is not a moral failure, but it is worth naming that you are choosing.
2. Say the true thing, out loud. Pour it out. If you have no words left, groaning counts. Asaph got a psalm out of it.
3. Then deliberately turn your thoughts. Not positive thinking, and not pretending. Recall something specific God has actually done, for you or for someone else. If your own list is empty, borrow. There are a lot of these on Crowd's What's the Story podcast.

If you want somewhere to start asking questions properly, the next Alpha course begins on 9 September, Wednesdays at 7:30pm. It is built for people who are investigating rather than convinced.

Where this leaves us

Sharon finished in Romans.

If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all good things? (Romans 8:31-32)

Psalm 77 does not promise the situation will improve. It does not promise the question gets answered. What it offers is a place to stand while you wait, and a God who has form.

So if you are somewhere hard right now, what would it look like to be properly honest with Him about it this week, and then to go looking for one thing He has already done?