Praying in a Waiting Room Without Anyone Noticing

You are in a plastic chair that does not recline, under lights that hum, and the carpet has a pattern designed to hide stains. Someone across from you is coughing in a way you are trying not to listen to. Your name has not been called yet. You want to pray and you also do not want the woman next to you, or the volunteer at the desk, to notice that your lips are moving and your eyes are wet.

This is not a strange problem. It is one of the oldest ones there is.

You do not need to move your lips

Nothing about prayer requires sound. It never has. The people who wrote the psalms we still use were often alone with a page, not standing in a crowd reciting aloud. What they put down were things said in the body, in the chest, behind the eyes. You can do that in a waiting room exactly as well as you can do it in a chapel.

So the practical answer first: keep your hands in your lap, your eyes open or half-closed, your face doing whatever it normally does when you are tired and waiting for a name to be called. Say the words in your head, the way you'd rehearse what you're going to tell the doctor. No one can hear a sentence you have not spoken. This is not a trick. It is simply what prayer has always been able to be.

What it is permissible to say

If you do not know what to say, here is what the Bible actually gives people permission to say in rooms very like this one.

It gives permission to be blunt about the body.

Have mercy on me, LORD, for I am in distress. My eye, my soul, and my body waste away with grief. For my life is spent with sorrow, my years with sighing. My strength fails because of my iniquity. My bones are wasted away. Psalm 31:9–11

You do not have to arrive at this prayer in a state of poise. The person who wrote this was not composed. His body was failing and he said so, plainly, without translating it into something more presentable first. If your prayer today is closer to "I am scared" or "I am so tired of this" than to anything you'd say out loud in front of others, that is not a lesser prayer. It is, if anything, the more honest kind.

It gives permission to ask, directly, without dressing it up.

Heal me, O LORD, and I will be healed. Save me, and I will be saved; for you are my praise. Jeremiah 17:14

This is one sentence. You can say the whole thing in the time it takes the automatic doors to open and close behind someone new coming in. It does not explain itself, does not justify the request, does not soften it with qualifications. If part of what you want, right now, is simply to be well, you are allowed to ask for that in exactly those terms. Asking is not the same as demanding a guarantee, and this piece will not offer you one. What we can say is that asking, in this bald and unadorned way, is something the Bible itself models rather than discourages.

It also gives permission to notice that you are not the one holding this up.

I will lift up my eyes to the hills. Where does my help come from? My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth. He will not allow your foot to be moved. He who keeps you will not slumber. Psalm 121:1–4

This was likely a song for travellers on a hard road, people who had to keep moving and could not afford to collapse but were, frankly, afraid of what was ahead. It does not promise the road will be short or the destination easy. It says the one keeping watch does not need to rest the way you do. In a waiting room, that can mean something small and specific: you do not have to hold the whole weight of what happens next by yourself for the next twenty minutes. You can put some of it down.

What the room won't let you do, and what it does not need to

You cannot kneel here. You cannot raise your hands, or read aloud, or do any of the things prayer sometimes looks like elsewhere. That is fine. There is a woman in Mark's Gospel who prayed, in effect, with a single act nobody around her noticed at first either.

A certain woman who had a discharge of blood for twelve years, and had suffered many things by many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was no better, but rather grew worse, having heard the things concerning Jesus, came up behind him in the crowd and touched his clothes. For she said, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be made well.” Mark 5:25–28

She had already been through years of medical treatment that had not worked and had cost her everything. Her prayer, if we can call it that, was not a speech. It was reaching out one hand in a crush of people who were not looking at her. Nobody around her clocked what she was doing until afterward. That is worth sitting with here: her story does not tell you that reaching out guarantees the same outcome for you, and it should not be read that way. What it does tell you is that a prayer can be almost entirely invisible and still be real. You are allowed something that small. A held breath. A hand pressed flat against your knee. A single sentence repeated in your head while you look at the noticeboard on the wall.

None of this replaces what the people in this building are trained to do. Prayer sits alongside the doctor, the test, the treatment plan, not instead of it. That is not a small print disclaimer, it is the shape the whole thing was always meant to take. You came here for medical care. Praying while you wait for it is not a competing plan. It is what you do with the parts of this that medicine cannot touch: the fear, the waiting itself, the twenty minutes with nothing to do but sit in it.

If you want a place to put this after you leave the chair, whatever the outcome of today's appointment, Prayer Pew has a space for writing your own situation down properly, when you have more than a waiting room's worth of quiet to do it in.

For tonight

You do not need more than this, said in your head, eyes open, face doing nothing unusual at all:

Heal me, LORD, and I will be healed. And if healing is not what today holds, keep me anyway.