When You Don’t Have the Words: An Interview with Reed S. Dunn

Sometimes we can’t find the right words to express our grief, longings, or even our joy. But in the Psalms, God gives us words to give back to him. In When You Don’t Have the Words: Praying the Psalms, Reed S. Dunn shows how the Psalms enrich our prayer lives.

In our interview below, Dunn discusses how he learned how to pray the Psalms and how it drew it into a conversation with God.

Reed S. Dunn is the pastor of Redeemer Hudson, New Jersey. He cares deeply about pastoral care and spiritual formation.

---

Lexham Press: To start, can you tell us the story behind When You Don’t Have the Words: Praying the Psalms and describe its basic thesis?
Reed S. Dunn: I was never good at prayer. I am more of a listener than a talker, so most of my prayer life felt like me and God wishing someone would say something. It was awkward, and I needed something better. What I really wanted was to be in conversation with God. All that changed when I started praying the Psalms. Not only did I have plenty of words to say to God, I also realized that praying Scripture meant God was speaking to me just as much as I was speaking to him. We were finally having a conversation, using the same script. And that brings me to the thesis of my book: God gave us the words to pray so we should use them.

LP: What contribution do you hope to make with your book?
Dunn: I think my biggest contribution is emphasizing how the entire psalter—all 150 psalms—are critical to our spiritual formation. I lay this out most clearly in chapter 2, where I talk about the Psalms creating spiritual muscle memory. We get a chance to practice having faith in all kinds of situations because the Psalms have us praying all kinds of prayers. War is not the time to learn to drive a tank, and neither is real life the best time to learn how to have faith. The Psalms work those muscles and build our reflexes beforehand, because we pray them even when we don’t yet need them.

LP: Now describe for the people reading this a particularly surprising or enjoyable aspect that you discovered from writing your book.
Dunn: There were times that I got writer’s block because of fear. I became scared of the people who might one day read my work. I would finish writing a chapter that I was proud of, then get flooded with pressure for the next to live up to the same standard. I put all kinds of pressure on myself. It was stupid, but totally on brand for me. I soon realized that the best thing I could do was simply write to God. I started thinking of this project as a prayer. It was my “thank you” letter to the Lord, expressing to him how the prayers that he had given me had completely changed my life.

LP: Tell us something about yourself that only your friends or family would know.
Dunn: I had to learn how to cook when my wife took a job in Manhattan a couple of years ago, only to discover that I love cooking exotic foods from around the world.