A cry is still a prayer
A third of the psalms are complaint. The angry prayers you have been swallowing are already in the Bible, given by God to be prayed, and there is a psalm that ends in the dark for the nights when you do too.
There is a person who stops praying, and it is not for the reason they will later give. Trouble came. For a few weeks the prayers went on out of habit. Then something changed at the kneeler. What rose was anger, or a flat tired nothing. The words that wanted out were words a good Christian does not say to God. So they stayed away. It felt more respectful than bringing Him a heart in that condition.
Months on, they say they lost their faith. I have heard it described that way more than once, and it is usually something smaller and stranger. It was good manners, aimed at the wrong God. They carried a picture of Him as someone who may only be approached tidy, and rather than insult that God they went silent. The God who wrote the psalms was never the one they were protecting.
The prayers already written
Roughly a third of the psalms are complaint. Nobody mentioned this to me in catechism class, and I have not read the psalms the same way since.
Israel's prayer book, the one Jesus grew up singing and the Church still prays morning and evening, is full of protest. How long will You forget me. Why do You hide Your face. I am worn out with crying. Those lines are the inspired word of God. He handed them to His people to pray, knowing what our lives would hold.
So when a person cannot pray politely, the impolite words have already been supplied, and by Him. He looked at the human race He loves and saw what was coming for us, and He put a hymnbook in our hands with pages for exactly this.
There are pages of fury in it. There is a page for the bed soaked with tears, and more than one that is mostly the word why. The God who inspired those pages is not going to be scandalised when someone uses them.
There has been a season when my prayers were mostly tears and sentences I would not print. Belonging to Him was never measured by the quality of the sentences.
Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your heart before him; God is a refuge for us.
Psalm 62:8 RSVCE
Pour it out. He asked for the heart rather than the presentable portion of it.
With your face towards Him
There is a real difference between two kinds of complaint, and politeness has nothing to do with it. One kind is spoken with your back to God. It rehearses His failures to anyone who will listen, and over time it hardens into a verdict: He does not care, and I am finished with Him. The other kind says the same terrible things, sometimes in worse language, but it says them to His face.
That second kind is what the psalms teach, and it is one of the strangest acts of faith there is. It assumes a great deal. You do not keep shouting at someone who has left the room. Nobody demands answers from a God they have decided is a fiction. Lament stays in the argument because it cannot bring itself to walk out of the relationship.
Job is the clearest case. He says wilder things to God than his pious friends can bear to hear, and they spend chapters correcting him with sound doctrine. At the end God speaks, and the friends are the ones in trouble. He says Job has spoken rightly of Him. The friends have not. Heaven sided with the man who shouted over the men who explained.
Jesus tells of a widow who keeps hammering on a judge's door until he gives in, and He tells it as a picture of how to pray. Heaven has a high tolerance for hammering. So if anger is what you have, bring the anger. If it is accusation, bring that. He has read worse than yours, in print, under His own name.
Lament is faith refusing to leave.
When it ends in the dark
Someone will ask where the complaint is meant to end, and most laments in the psalter do turn. Somewhere past the middle, after the protest has been fully spoken, a small hinge appears: but I have trusted in Your steadfast love. The complaint opens into remembering, and remembering opens into a thin real hope. That movement often happens to the one praying, unplanned, the way warmth comes back to a numb hand.
But there is one psalm I want you to know about, because one day you may need it. Psalm 88 never turns. It begins in trouble and ends in the dark, with the one praying still alone and God still silent, and it is in the book. God's people have prayed it for something like three thousand years and nobody has corrected the ending.
It exists for the nights when the hinge will not come, when even "but I have trusted" would be a lie in your mouth.
On such a night you may pray a prayer that ends in the dark. God accepted that psalm into Scripture. He will accept it from you. He is not marking your prayers for structure. And if the dark tonight is the kind that has started making plans, please do not read on and hope it passes; reach someone who can pick up, and let the praying wait until you are safe.
If you have no words at all, borrow. Open the psalms and read until a line says what you cannot, then stop there and let it be your prayer. Monasteries have worn the psalter soft doing exactly this. Or pray the laments that fit inside one breath. How long. Help me. Stay. A cry is still a prayer, and it may be the truest one you ever make, because nothing in it was composed for an audience.
He asked for the whole heart, poured out, and He can be trusted with the unedited one. The psalms are the proof, printed and bound.