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For the negative test, the loss nobody acknowledged, and the years of it. These prayers do not use anyone else’s story to promise you yours.
Choose the prayer closest to your situation. You can pray it as written, change the words, or begin with a single line.
Nobody tells you how much of this is admin. Appointments, dates, a chart on your phone, a bathroom floor at six in the morning. And then a whole life going on around it, at work, at church, in the family group chat, as if nothing is happening.
You may have been praying about this for years. You may have stopped. Both are common and neither is a failure. Plenty of people in this find that the words dry up entirely and the only honest prayer left is one flat sentence.
The prayers below are short on purpose, grouped by the moment you are actually in. Say one. Say part of one. Change the words. Nothing here is a formula, and none of it depends on you praying it well.
17 prayers on this page, and 9 Bible passages with notes on what they mean.
The same five minutes, the same result, and a whole day to get through afterwards. These are for the moment you already know what it says and have not moved yet.
It is no again. I am sitting on the bathroom floor and I do not want to get up. I have nothing to say to you about it yet, God. Stay here while I get my breath back.
I have to go downstairs now and say it out loud, and it will land on them too. Give me something to say, Lord. Keep us gentle with each other today, even if neither of us can manage more than that.
God, not again. That is all I have. Not again. I am not going to dress it up for you tonight, and I do not think I need to.
Waiting rooms, blood tests, a phone call that could come any time between nine and five. For the hours when there is nothing left to do but wait for someone else to tell you.
Four times now I have read the same poster. Be in this room, God. Whatever they tell me in there, be in the room when they say it, and be with me in the car park afterwards.
Steady the hands and the judgement of the people looking after us. Give them care in how they say things. Where there is something they can do, let them do it well.
God, it could ring at any minute. Hold me until it does.
Anger is not a lapse in faith. It is a large part of the psalms. These are for the nights you are furious, with your body, with the people who got it easily, with God.
How long, God. You have not answered and I am tired of asking politely. I am not going to pretend I understand this. I am still here, and I am still talking to you, and that is all I can offer tonight.
Everyone is asleep and I am doing the sums again. My age, the months, the money. Take the calculator out of my hands, God. I am not asking you to explain anything. Just get me to the morning.
I am angry with you. I have not left. Do what you like with that.
Lord, I have started to hate my own body for something it did not choose. Help me stop treating it as the accused. It is the body you gave me and it is carrying this too.
The group chat, the scan photo, the christening you are invited to. You can be genuinely glad for them and quietly winded at the same time, and both are true at once.
I am pleased for them and I cannot breathe. Both of those are true, God. Let me send a kind reply and then let me be honest with you about the rest of it.
I said yes, and now I have to walk in. Get me through the door, Lord, keep my face kind, and let me leave when I need to without making it about me.
God, bless her and the child. Keep them safe. Give her an easy time of it. I mean all of that, even if I have to say it through my teeth.
There is a baptism at the front and a family photo on the screen. I do not want to be the person who cannot look. Hold me in this pew, Lord, until the singing stops.
An early miscarriage, a pregnancy that only two people knew about, a due date that comes round every year. The loss was real even if there was no funeral and nobody sent a card.
God, you saw. Nobody else did. You saw.
Today was the day. Nobody at work knows and I am not going to tell them. I am telling you instead, Lord. Hold what we lost, and hold us, and let today be got through.
We never got a name, a photograph, or a single person asking how we were. You know who was there, God. Keep them. We are not able to carry this on our own.
What each passage meant where it was written, and what it does and does not offer you now.
For the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David. How long, O Jehovah? wilt thou forget me for ever? How long wilt thou hide thy face from me?
Psalm 13:1–6: read the chapter
David asks the question four times in two verses and God does not correct him for it. This is what a complaint sounds like inside Scripture rather than outside it. If you have been told that asking how long is a failure of trust, this psalm is evidence against that. The trust in verse five comes after the complaint, not instead of it.
And Hannah answered and said, No, my lord, I am a woman of a sorrowful spirit: I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but I poured out my soul before Jehovah.
1 Samuel 1:1–20: read the chapter
Hannah is praying so hard the priest assumes she is drunk, and her husband has already tried the line about being better to her than ten sons. Both responses are familiar to anyone in this. What the passage gives you is the shape of her prayer, not a guarantee of her outcome. Samuel’s birth belongs to his particular calling in Israel, and it is not a promise made to you.
Is anything too hard for Jehovah? At the set time I will return unto thee, when the season cometh round, and Sarah shall have a son.
Genesis 18:9–15: read the chapter
This is the verse most often quoted at people who cannot conceive, usually with the second half left off. Read whole, it is a dated, specific promise to one couple inside the covenant story, not a general principle about what God will do for anyone who believes enough. Sarah laughs at it. God does not punish her for laughing.
And she called the name of Jehovah that spake unto her, Thou art a God that seeth: for she said, Have I even here looked after him that seeth me?
Genesis 16:1–13: read the chapter
Hagar is a slave, handed over because Sarai wanted a child, then treated harshly until she ran. Nothing that household does is offered as a model. What survives the story is where God turns up, which is in the wilderness with the woman nobody was looking after. She is the one who gets to name him. If you feel unseen in this, that is the line to keep.
I will say unto God my rock, Why hast thou forgotten me? Why go I mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?
Psalm 42:5–11: read the chapter
The writer talks to his own soul, tells it to hope, and then in the next breath accuses God of forgetting him. He does this twice. It is not a tidy progress from despair to faith, it is a person going round the same loop, which is exactly what a long wait feels like. Being in the loop is not evidence that something is wrong with your faith.
And in like manner the Spirit also helpeth our infirmity: for we know not how to pray as we ought; but the Spirit himself maketh intercession for [us] with groanings which cannot be uttered;
Romans 8:22–27: read the chapter
Paul is writing about a whole creation in labour, which is a deliberately obstetric image and a hard one to read in this situation. The use of it here is narrow and practical. When you cannot pray, when the words have gone and all that is left is a noise in your chest, the letter says that noise is already being carried. You are not required to find better words first.
Wait for Jehovah: Be strong, and let thy heart take courage; Yea, wait thou for Jehovah.
Psalm 27:13–14: read the chapter
Waiting here means staying with God through something unresolved. It does not mean the thing you are waiting for is on its way. People use this verse to tell others that a baby is coming if they hold on, which the psalm never says. Read plainly it is a command to keep your nerve, addressed to someone who has no idea how it ends.
Now faith is assurance of [things] hoped for, a conviction of things not seen.
Hebrews 11:1–3: read the chapter
This gets turned into a technique. Believe hard enough in the outcome and the outcome arrives, and if it does not, your faith was the faulty part. That reading makes every childless person a failed believer, which is cruel and is not what the sentence says. Faith here is trust in God himself, not certainty about a specific event you have decided on.
Rejoice with them that rejoice; weep with them that weep.
Romans 12:15: read the chapter
Churches are usually good at the first half and poor at the second. There is a Sunday for a baptism and no Sunday for a loss that was never announced. If someone has handed you a verse instead of sitting with you, this is the instruction they skipped. It is also worth saying to yourself: you are allowed to want the weeping half.
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.
Verses on this subject get used as leverage. Hannah, Sarah and Elizabeth all conceived, so their stories get handed to you as proof that yours will end the same way, and when it does not, the fault is quietly moved to your faith. None of those narratives is a promise made to you. Childlessness is not a punishment, a lesson, or a sign that you prayed badly. Nothing here replaces the care of a doctor or a counsellor, and if this is becoming more than you can hold, please tell your GP or someone you trust. If you are frightened by your own thoughts, that is not something to hold on your own until an appointment comes round. Tell someone tonight, whatever the hour.
Pick one prayer from the group that matches today. Say it out loud once, even badly, even in the car. That is enough for today. If you can, tell one person you trust what date is coming up, so that when it arrives you are not the only one who knows.
