This title, “Praises,” catches our attention because it is inaccurate. Most psalms are complaints. They are calls of help by helpless and hurting men and women. They are wrung out of desperate conditions. A life of prayer forces us to deal with the reality of the world and of our own lives at a depth and with an honesty that is quite unheard of by the prayerless, and much of that reality we would certainly avoid if we could. Do we really want to feel this deeply? If we knew that was where prayer takes us, would we have ever signed on?
“Praises” as a title is not statistically accurate but it is accurate all the same. It is accurate because it accurately describes the end, the finished product. All prayer, pursued far enough, becomes praise. Any prayer, no matter how desperate its origin, no matter how angry and fearful the experiences it traverses, ends up in praise. It does not always get there quickly or easily – the trip can take a lifetime – but the end is always praise. “Praises,” in fact, is the only accurate title for our prayer book, for it is the goal that shapes the journey: “The end is where we start from.”1

Eugene Peterson, Answering God, pp. 121-122.