Mbandaka, DRC · March 10–14, 2025
Psalms: Layer by Layer Training
In Scriptura’s training materials, there is an image of David lamenting. He is sitting in a chair. Four participants in Mbandaka flagged it. One explained: “According to our context, the person who is lamenting should be sitting on the floor with his hands on his head and not on a chair.”
They weren’t being pedantic. They were identifying something real: if David were sitting in a chair, it communicates composed, upright suffering rather than the collapsed, floor-level grief that the psalms of lament actually describe — and that Congolese culture would recognize as lament.
These were the same participants who had spent hours inside those psalms — learning their emotional arc, mapping the texture of David’s despair, internalizing the difference between Psalm 13’s raw cry and Psalm 133’s expansive joy. They had learned to read the emotional layer of a psalm. And then they looked at the image and saw it was wrong. That is the training working. The chair will need to go.
