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For the scan, the ward, the waiting room, and the ordinary Tuesday when you are simply tired of being ill. Prayer sits alongside your medical care, never in place of it.
God, I heard the words and then I heard nothing else. I do not know what to ask for yet. Stay near me while the room comes back into focus, and carry today, because I cannot.
Two short prayers from this page, ready to print. No account or email needed.
Most people looking for a prayer about illness are not looking for a paragraph about prayer. They want words to say now, in the twenty minutes before the phone rings back, or in the corridor outside the consultant's office.
So the prayers come first. Say them out loud if you can. Say half of one and stop, if that is what you have. Nobody is marking this.
We have not promised anything on God's behalf in them. You will not find a prayer here that assumes the result will be good, because we do not know that, and neither does anyone who tells you otherwise. What is here is honest asking, the kind the Psalms are full of, and company for the hours when you are too tired to be eloquent.
17 prayers on this page, and 9 Bible passages with notes on what they mean.
For the first hours after a diagnosis, when the words have been said and nothing has sunk in yet, and you still have to get home and tell people.
I am in the car park and I cannot start the engine. Be here. That is all.
I have to say this out loud now, to my mother, to my children, to the people at work. Give me the words. Give me the patience to let them take it badly if they need to, and not to manage their feelings as well as my own.
For the night before, the fasting from midnight, the morning list that runs late, and the days afterwards when the result exists somewhere and you have not been told it.
God, tomorrow morning people I have never met will take care of my body while I know nothing about it. Steady their hands. Steady me tonight. I am frightened, and I am still yours.
Bless the surgeon, the anaesthetist, and the nurse who checks on me at three in the morning. Give them clear heads at the end of a long shift, and let them be kind to the person in the next bed too.
Into your hands, God. I have nothing else to give you tonight.
The result has been sitting in somebody's inbox since Friday. I have checked my phone forty times. Hold me in the gap between knowing nothing and knowing, and keep me from filling it with the worst thing I can imagine.
For long conditions, the ones with no finish line, where the crisis is over and the tiredness is not, and nobody asks how you are any more.
God, there is nothing new to report. Same body, same pills, same tiredness. I am not asking for a miracle this morning. I am asking you to sit with me through another unremarkable day of it.
I have prayed this so many times the words have gone thin. Hear it anyway. Heal me. And if not, keep me.
Thank you for the hour this afternoon when it eased. I noticed it. I am telling you about it, because there is not much else to tell.
For the days when you are furious, or flat, or sick of being prayed over by people who are well. Anger is allowed in here, and the Psalms are full of it.
This is not fair and I am not going to pretend otherwise. I have watched other people get better. I have not. I am angry with you, and I am bringing it to you rather than walking off. Do something.
I have no prayer left. Here I am.
People keep telling me to have more faith, and I do not know what else I am supposed to produce. If faith is something I have to manufacture, I am finished. Meet me with what I actually have, which is not much this week.
For the ones sitting beside the bed, driving to appointments, or three hundred miles away and unable to do anything except this.
She is on a ward tonight and I am at home, useless. Be in that room. Send somebody with a kind voice at three in the morning. Do for her what I cannot do from here.
He is too small for this, God. I would take it off him if I could, and I cannot, so I am asking you to be near him, to make the doctors thorough, and to hold the rest of us up while it goes on.
I am tired in a way that sleeping does not touch. Help me not to snap at him today. Keep something in me that is still gentle, and send somebody to take Thursday off my hands.
We are at the end of what medicine can do. Do not let him be frightened. Let him hear a familiar voice. Be with him now, and be with us when the room goes quiet.
What each passage meant where it was written, and what it does and does not offer you now.
Have mercy upon me, O Jehovah; for I am withered away: O Jehovah, heal me; for my bones are troubled.
These five verses are a sick man praying badly, and they were kept in the book anyway. No composure, no thanksgiving tacked on, and the request is still unanswered when the excerpt runs out. Confidence does arrive later in the psalm, and it does not cancel the complaint or tidy it away. If your praying at the moment sounds like complaint with a request buried in it, you are praying in a form Scripture already recognises.
Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; Who healeth all thy diseases;
Psalm 103:1–5: read the chapter
Quoted on its own, this line gets handed to ill people as a warranty. It is a song of praise looking back over a whole life and naming what God is like, not a contract with your name on it. Read it as gratitude rather than a claim form, and it stops being a stick to beat yourself with when the treatment fails.
He giveth power to the faint; and to him that hath no might he increaseth strength.
Isaiah 40:28–31: read the chapter
Written to people already worn down by exile, not to people starting fresh. The famous ending is usually read as soaring, but notice the order it finishes in: mounting up on wings, then running, then simply walking without fainting. The promise gets quieter and more useful as it goes. Most illness is survived at the walking end of that sentence.
But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.
Isaiah 53:3–5: read the chapter
This half sentence is used to insist that physical recovery has already been secured and you need only claim it. Christian traditions read the passage in different ways, and none of them makes it a schedule for your scan. Worth noticing what comes earlier in it: the servant is acquainted with disease himself. He is not addressing you from the healthy side of the ward.
And he said unto her, Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace, and be whole of thy plague.
Mark 5:25–34: read the chapter
That sentence has been turned into a formula, as though faith were the mechanism and a poor result meant a poor supply. Look at the woman instead. Twelve years ill, treated by many physicians, worse rather than better, and out of money. The account tells you what happened to her. It does not tell you what is owed to you.
Jesus answered, Neither did this man sin, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.
The disciples ask whose fault it was. Jesus refuses the question outright, which is the part to hold on to at three in the morning when you are auditing your own life for the cause. It does not follow that anyone is made ill to serve as a lesson for the healthy, and disabled people have had that sentence used against them for centuries.
Jesus wept.
John 11:32–36: read the chapter
Two words, and they are usually rushed past on the way to the ending. Mary opens with an accusation about what he failed to do, and he does not correct her theology. He cries. Whatever you believe about what comes later, grief in the presence of God is not a failure of trust, and nobody has to be composed to be near him.
Concerning this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me.
2 Corinthians 12:7–10: read the chapter
Paul asked more than once and it was not taken away. Nobody knows what the thorn was, and the guessing has never helped anyone. This passage is often used to tell an ill person that God arranged their condition to improve their character. Paul says that about his own life, in his own words. It is not something anyone else may say about yours.
Is any among you sick? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord:
James 5:13–16: read the chapter
The instruction is to call for other people. The sick person is not left alone to generate enough belief; the church comes to them with oil and prayer. The line about the prayer of faith has since been read backwards, so that continuing illness proves a fault in the patient. That reading contradicts the passage, which puts the work on the community, not on the person who is ill.
Quoted from the American Standard Version (1901), which is in the public domain. Every reference on this page was checked against the text. Chapter links open the same translation in our reader.
Sooner or later somebody will tell you that you would be better by now if you believed harder, or that God sent this to teach you something, or that real faith would mean coming off your medication. None of that is true and none of it is care. Ongoing illness is not evidence of thin faith or unconfessed sin. A healing account in the Gospels describes what happened to one person; it is not a guarantee of your result or your timing. Keep taking what you have been prescribed, and keep telling your medical team the truth about how you are.
Pick the shortest prayer on this page and say it once, out loud, before you put the phone down. Then tell one person how bad it actually is: your GP, your nurse, someone who will not flinch. If you are getting worse quickly, treat that as urgent and contact your medical team rather than waiting it out. And if you have started thinking about ending your life, say so today, to your doctor or to one of the lines at the top of this page. Long illness and constant pain take people there far more often than anyone admits.
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