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What follows is a re-praying of Psalm 71. It isn’t so much a paraphrase as a prayer based on the psalm. Like the psalm, this prayer uses the single personal pronoun, but that doesn’t preclude it from being a communally articulated prayer. The refrain “Life is full of trouble —yet I trust in you, my God” is not a part of the psalm but added as a rhetorical device.

As we listen to the news from our communities and around the world, we can find ourselves overwhelmed by all that is wrong with it. This prayer of petition and lament brings some of those circumstances to God.

Many of us can resonate with Psalm 80’s plea to God to “hear us,” “restore us,” and “save us” intermingled with the gut-wrenching question “how long?”. It doesn’t take much pastoral imagination to think of ways in which members of our community relate to this psalm and what occasions have brought the lament “how long?” onto their lips. For that reason it is an important psalm to turn to again and again and worth exploring in its entirety.