Dan Allender - The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God

When Dan and Tremper get together its just the best. This is even better for your soul than chicken soup.

JOHN ORTBERG

Senior pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church and author of All the Places to Go... How Will You Know?

This book shows that emotions are neither an embarrassment nor an impediment to spirituality, but the very stuff God uses as He shapes His salvation in us.

EUGENE H. PETERSON

Author of The Message

If we are to be rescued from the incessant tendency to psychologize the gospel, this book will be a good start. Dan and Tremper give us not more psychological information, but biblical encouragement to be faithful.

MICHAEL CARD

Singer, songwriter, and author of Immanuel: Reflections on the Life of Christ

Allender and Longman add an important contribution to a new wave of Psalm studies. There is an enormous temptation for high faith to deny the dark side of life where things do not work. Against that common propensity, they show how the Psalms make contact with the emotions of failure. Such places in life become, by their sensitive reading of the Psalms, places of revelatory healing and transformation. Readers will be helped to fresh and faithful discernment of life and text.

WALTER BRUEGGEMANN

Professor of Old Testament, Columbia Theological Seminary

An excellent piece of scholarship suitable equally for the layperson and the theologian.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

Exactly what we need in a world of declining civility where pain, grief, and suffering seem to be increasing almost beyond our capacity to cope.

ANN APPLEGARTH

Virtue

The Cry of the Soul is a thoughtful book. It invites us to admit whatever we feel, to know that were not alone in what we feel, but then to follow a path that our emotions illumine into a life-changing encounter with God. Its message is away from managing our feelings toward entering the mystery of our emotional life as a means of knowing the Lord more fully. And thats the message our world needs to hear.

LARRY CRABB

Christian counselor, author, and founder of New Way Ministries

Dan and Tremper have done us a fierce kindness. In a culture committed to either running from or wallowing in our emotions, The Cry of the Soul offers an excruciating but hopeful alternative to listen to our own hearts (as did the psalmists) so we can better receive and worship the pursuing heart of God.

NANCY GROOM

Author of From Bondage to Bonding

The Cry of the Soul offers insight after surprising insight into the unexpected relationship between our emotions and our view of God. A needed correction to a simplistic explaining away of pain and suffering.

DANIEL TAYLOR

Author of The Myth of Certainty

In The Cry of the Soul I hear an echo of my own heart-cry and that of the psalmists to know God intimately and authentically, and to see Him powerfully at work in our broken world.

LUCI SHAW

Author of God in the Dark

NavPress is the publishing ministry of The Navigators, an international Christian organization and leader in personal spiritual development. NavPress is committed to helping people grow spiritually and enjoy lives of meaning and hope through personal and group resources that are biblically rooted, culturally relevant, and highly practical.

For a free catalog go to www.NavPress.com.

The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God

Copyright 1994 by Wounded Heart Ministries. All rights reserved.

Foreword copyright 2015 by Joni Eareckson Tada. All rights reserved.

A NavPress resource published in alliance with Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

NAVPRESS and the NAVPRESS logo are registered trademarks of NavPress, The Navigators, Colorado Springs, CO. TYNDALE is a registered trademark of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, IL. Absence of in connection with marks of NavPress or other parties does not indicate an absence of registration of those marks.

Designed by Faceout Studio, Jeff Miller

Cover photograph of chair copyright Louis W/Shutterstock. All rights reserved.

Cover photograph of photo room copyright coka/Shutterstock. All rights reserved.

Scripture taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. (Some quotations may be from the earlier NIV edition, copyright 1984.) Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Some of the anecdotal illustrations in this book are true to life and are included with the permission of the persons involved. All other illustrations are composites of real situations, and any resemblance to people living or dead is coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Allender, Dan B.

The cry of the soul : how our emotions reveal our deepest questions about God / Dan B. Allender, Tremper Longman III.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0-89109-827-5

1. Emotions Religious aspects Christianity. 2. God. I. Longman, Tremper. II.-Title.

BV4597.3.A45 1994

248.2 dc20 94-14312

CIP

ISBN 978-1-57683-180-9

ISBN 978-1-63146-504-8 (ePub); ISBN 978-1-60006-544-6 (Kindle); ISBN 978-1-63146-505-5 (Apple)

Build: 2021-04-21 13:26:42 EPUB 3.0

In Memoriam

Dr. Raymond B. Dillard

19441993

I dont get it. I just dont understand God.

It was a comment Id heard one other time from my coworker, Greg. Maybe the long drive to our workshop had gotten to him, with a still longer freeway ahead. I watched him from my wheelchair behind the drivers seat. Something told me hed be more comfortable by a trout stream today than leading a disability workshop.

Greg is divorced and every once in a while the wound can seep. Like this afternoon. He has one hand on the wheel while stretching with the other to feed banana and crackers to his son. Ryan is his beautiful ten-year-old boy with the happy smile that makes you forget hes intellectually disabled, incontinent, and except for his giggles or occasional shrieks cant put two words together in a sentence.

I look at Greg and Ryan and try to picture the wife and mother on the scene, holding Ryan on her lap. Shed be cooing in his ear and have the banana neatly peeled and sliced in a Tupperware. And shed wipe that banana mush from his face.

I recall that Greg is diabetic when he tosses the banana peel and reaches for his insulin kit with his free hand. Prick finger. Watch freeway. Swig sugary apple juice. Eye on Ryan. Hey, big boy. Greg wipes his mouth and smiles at his son, who dazzles us with his grin. Greg is as driven as he drives his hamster-wheel days seem to be filled with tackling one dizzying problem after another. Then theres his thirteen-year-old daughter, Kelsey, fascinated with her newfound appeal to boys. We wont even go there.

Sundays are the hardest. Like last week after church when Greg and the kids bumped into their mother in a drugstore. Kelsey, Ryan, and Mommy became a bundle of hugs. Greg wished he could be part of the bundle, but it was the usual awkwardness. Niceties were exchanged, and then it was time to move on. Screams and tears erupted from Ryan as they parted company. That Sunday closed out with a speeding ticket, going 50 in a 35 mph zone. He stared vacantly at the policeman. He didnt care.