Psalm 42 is the one where the writer argues with himself, out loud, in public, and never quite wins. It is also — read carefully — an instruction in what to do when you cannot make yourself feel the thing you know is true.
It is thirsty, not sad
“As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God” (42:1).
The image is not gentle. A panting deer is an animal in distress looking for water it has not found. The psalm opens with a need that is unmet, and it says so before it says anything else.
“My tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me all the day long, ‘Where is your God?'” (42:3). There is a taunt in this psalm, and it is a specific one — not “God does not exist”, but “where is He, then”. That is a much harder question, and it is being asked of someone who cannot answer it.
The refrain, three times
“Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God” (42:5).
It comes back at 42:11, and again at 43:5 — which is the main reason many read Psalms 42 and 43 as one song split in two. Three repetitions of the same refrain, with the same argument, unresolved each time.
Notice who is talking to whom. He is not addressing God here; he is addressing himself. This is a man taking his own soul aside and telling it something.
That distinction is the practical content of the psalm. There is a difference between feeling hopeful and preaching hope to yourself while feeling nothing of the kind, and only the second one is available on demand.
He does not talk himself out of it
Here is what makes it honest. The refrain does not work — or rather, it does not resolve the psalm. He says it, and then he goes back to describing how bad things are: “Deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterfalls; all your breakers and your waves have gone over me” (42:7).
Then he says it again. Then, in Psalm 43, again.
Nothing in the text suggests he ended the day cheerful. What he did was refuse to stop speaking, refuse to stop addressing God, and keep telling himself the true thing at intervals. That is the model, and it is far more usable than a psalm that resolved cleanly would be.
The tense of the refrain
“I shall again praise him.” Not “I praise him”. Not “I feel like praising him”.
The hope in this psalm is entirely future and it is entirely specific: there will be a time when this is not how it is. He does not know when. He is not pretending to.
Memory is doing the work — “these things I remember… how I would go with the throng and lead them in procession to the house of God” (42:4). He is a worship leader remembering leading, and he cannot do it right now. That detail is easy to miss and it changes the whole psalm.
Why this belongs in a songbook
Because a hymnal that only contains resolved songs is useless to the person in the middle. Around a third of the Psalms are laments and almost no congregation sings them, which leaves people improvising language for the worst weeks of their lives.
Psalm 42 hands you a script: say what is true about the situation, address God rather than the air, and tell your own soul the truth at intervals whether or not it listens.
What I take from it as a writer
Mostly the refrain. A song that keeps returning to one line is doing something a song that develops cannot — it is giving you a sentence to hold rather than an argument to follow. That is what repetition is for, when there is something worth repeating.
Redemption & Faith is a chronological record, and this is roughly where its middle sits. The singles are here, and this is what Scripture says about the wait.