When You Have No Words of Your Own, Borrow a Psalm | Prayer Pew
When You Have No Words of Your Own, Borrow a Psalm
The Prayer Pew team · 22 October 2026 · 6 min read
You searched because the words ran out
Maybe you sat down to pray and nothing came. Maybe you have been praying the same three words for days, "help me, please", and you are embarrassed that this is all you have. Maybe someone told you to pray the Psalms and you do not know where to start, or what to do with the lines that do not match how you actually feel. This is a practice for exactly that. It takes ten minutes, and it does not require you to find the right words, because you are not going to use your own.
Where this comes from
The book of Psalms is a collection of other people's prayers. Some are furious. Some are grateful. Some are so flattened by grief that they barely finish a sentence. For thousands of years, people have taken these words into their own mouths and prayed them as if they were their own, even when the exact circumstances did not match. A farmer prayed David's war psalm. A woman with no enemies prayed the psalm about enemies, because the ache under it, of feeling surrounded and unseen, was close enough.
This is not cheating. It is not a sign that your faith is too weak to produce its own words. The whole point of a shared prayer book is that it holds language for states you have not yet found words for yourself. If anything, reaching for someone else's prayer when you have none of your own is one of the oldest and most ordinary things a person of faith can do.
Pick the state, not the perfect match
You do not need a psalm that describes your exact situation. You need one that matches the shape of what you feel. Here are a few starting points.
If you feel forgotten, like God has gone quiet and you are still waiting:
How long, O Jehovah? wilt thou forget me for ever? How long wilt thou hide thy face from me? How long shall I take counsel in my soul, Having sorrow in my heart all the day? How long shall mine enemy be exalted over me? Consider [and] answer me, O Jehovah my God: Lighten mine eyes, lest I sleep the [sleep of] death; Lest mine enemy say, I have prevailed against him; [Lest] mine adversaries rejoice when I am moved. But I have trusted in thy lovingkindness; My heart shall rejoice in thy salvation. I will sing unto Jehovah, Because he hath dealt bountifully with me.
Psalm 13:1–6
Notice it does not start with an answer. It stays in the "how long" for four full lines before it moves anywhere else. You are allowed to stay there too.
Quoted from the World English Bible, British Edition, which is in the public domain. Every reference above was checked against the text before this piece was published.
If you feel alone, specifically alone, like no one around you understands what this is costing you:
I cry with my voice unto Jehovah; With my voice unto Jehovah do I make supplication. I pour out my complaint before him; I show before him my trouble. When my spirit was overwhelmed within me, Thou knewest my path. In the way wherein I walk Have they hidden a snare for me. Look on [my] right hand, and see; For there is no man that knoweth me: Refuge hath failed me; No man careth for my soul. I cried unto thee, O Jehovah; I said, Thou art my refuge, My portion in the land of the living. Attend unto my cry; For I am brought very low: Deliver me from my persecutors; For they are stronger than I. Bring my soul out of prison, That I may give thanks unto thy name: The righteous shall compass me about; For thou wilt deal bountifully with me.
Psalm 142:1–7
This was written from a cave. The person praying it was hiding, and said so. If you feel like you are hiding too, from a diagnosis, a decision, a conversation you are avoiding, this is a prayer that already knows that feeling.
If you have no energy for more than a single line, there is this one:
Trust in him at all times, ye people; Pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us. [Selah
Psalm 62:8
You could say just that, once, slowly, and stop.
What to do with the lines you do not mean
This is the part people get stuck on. You read Psalm 13 and get to "I have trusted in thy lovingkindness; My heart shall rejoice" and think, I don't. Not today. Should you skip it, or lie?
Neither. Say the line anyway, but say it as a question, or as a hope you are borrowing rather than a report of your current state. You are not claiming your heart rejoices right now. You are saying, this is where the prayer eventually goes, and I am willing to walk toward it even though I am not there. Some of the psalms do this work for you out loud, arguing with themselves mid-sentence:
Why art thou cast down, O my soul? And [why] art thou disquieted within me? Hope thou in God; for I shall yet praise him [For] the help of his countenance.
Psalm 42:5
The psalm writer is not pretending to feel hopeful. He is talking to his own soul, telling it to hope, because right now it is not managing to on its own. You can do exactly that. Read the line that does not match you, and treat it as something you are saying to yourself rather than something you already believe.
When even borrowed words feel like performance
Sometimes this practice will not work. You will read the psalm aloud and it will feel like reading someone else's mail, flat and distant, and you will wonder if you are even praying at all. If that happens, stop trying to feel it. Feeling is not the test.
There is a woman in the Old Testament who went to pray and could not get a single audible word out. Her lips moved, nothing was heard, and the priest watching her assumed she was drunk. She told him plainly that she was pouring out her soul, not performing anything for an audience. Her prayer counted. It was answered. Eloquence was never the measure, and it is not the measure of yours either. If all you can manage today is moving your lips with no sound, or sitting with the psalm open and not reading it aloud at all, that is still prayer.
For we have not a high priest that cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but one that hath been in all points tempted like as [we are, yet] without sin. Let us therefore draw near with boldness unto the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy, and may find grace to help [us] in time of need.
Hebrews 4:14–16
Draw near with boldness, it says, in time of need, which is a strange thing to say to someone who has no polished words. It suggests the lack of words is not the barrier. The barrier would be staying away.
For the next ten minutes
Pick one psalm from above, whichever shape is closest to what you feel right now. Read it aloud, slowly, once. When you hit a line that does not match you, pause and say quietly, "I'm not there yet, but I'm saying this toward you." Then keep going. If you want somewhere to take what is left over afterward, you can bring the specific thing, the diagnosis, the waiting, the argument you cannot undo, to a prayer for your own situation. You do not need better words for that either.
