Prayers for healing and illness
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.
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.
When you have just been told
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.
The first hour after the news
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.