“1 As the deer pants for the water brooks, So pants my soul for You, O God.
2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?
3 My tears have been my food day and night, While they continually say to me, “Where is your God?””

The Good News version attributes Psalm 42 as “The Prayer of a Man in Exile”, and translates verse 6 as, “Here in exile my heart is breaking”.
The psalm resembles the book of Lamentations, which outlines the plight of the people of Israel in exile following the capture and destruction of Jerusalem and its temple, by Babylon.
Both describe the acute pain of the absence of God. Lamentations describes the terrible physical suffering of those in exile, but even worse is the absence or silence of God; e.g. Lamentations 3:8, “Even when I call out or cry for help, he shuts out my prayer.”

Our human condition is one of suffering and physical death, due to our heritage of sin and the choice of sin by each new generation. With God’s presence in the temple, and His promises in the Old Covenant to bless mankind, Israel had hope. But with God’s silence and His apparent absence, the human condition seemed hopeless and unbearable.

We are blessed with the gift of God’s presence through the Holy Spirit, at all times and wherever we are, we don’t need to be in the temple. But there can be times for us just like the writer of Psalm 42, when our world seems to have gone down the plug hole, and God seems to be silent.

Both Psalm 42 and Lamentations show us how to cope with those times of spiritual drought, by:

(a) Praising and trusting in God regardless of our circumstances:
Psalm 42:11, “Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Saviour and my God.”

(b) Bringing all our pain, suffering, doubts, and fears to him.
Lamentations 5:22, “unless you have utterly rejected us and are angry with us beyond measure.”
Even the doubts and fears we take to Him are an expression of our trust in Him, that only He can understand and give the answers we need.