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For pain that has outlasted everyone’s patience, including your own. These prayers do not look for the meaning in it.
Choose the prayer closest to your situation. You can pray it as written, change the words, or begin with a single line.
You have probably had this explained to you by now. Someone has told you what God might be teaching you through it. Someone has suggested a supplement, a specialist, a stronger sort of faith. You have stopped bringing it up, because of the face people make.
We do not know why this has not stopped. We are not going to tell you it is building something in you, and we are not going to tell you it will be over soon.
What we can offer is words for the days when you have none of your own. Say the ones that fit. Skip the rest. If you get three words in and stop, that counted.
16 prayers on this page, and 8 Bible passages with notes on what they mean.
For the pain that is not news any more. The condition with a name, or the one without a name yet. You have run out of ways to describe it and other people have run out of ways to ask.
Today is the same as yesterday was. I am not asking you to explain it, God. I am asking you to be here while I get through the hours between now and the evening, and to help me not to be cruel to the people in this house.
I am still here. That is all I have got today.
The appointments and the tablets and the forms have turned into a second job and I am sick of it. Give me enough for today, Lord, to keep doing the boring things that help. Give me the nerve to ask again for help from people who have not helped yet.
God, my body is not doing what I ask of it. I have stopped expecting it to. Be near the parts of me that hurt. Be near the part of me that has gone quiet about it. I do not know what to ask for, so I am just telling you.
Three in the morning, when the painkillers have worn off or the thoughts have started up, and it is a long way until light. If tonight is worse than that, the lines at the top of this page are answered at this hour, and ringing one is not a failure of nerve or of faith.
It is dark and I am awake again. I am not going to pretend I am peaceful about it. Sit with me until it gets light. If I sleep, thank you. If I do not, stay anyway.
God, I am frightened. Hold on to me.
I am counting the hours and there are too many of them. I cannot see how I will do tomorrow, Lord. Let me not have to see it yet. Give me the next hour, and then come back and give me the one after that.
Angry at God, at the doctors, at people whose lives carried on as normal. This is a prayer page and not a rebuke. The Psalms shout, and nobody took them out of the book.
This is not fair and I am saying so. Other people got better. Other people got answers. I have prayed the way I was told to pray, God, and nothing has moved. I am not leaving. I am just not going to be polite about it tonight.
I do not want to be the person who cannot be glad for anyone. You know what I thought when they told me their news. I am not proud of it and I am not hiding it from you. Keep something soft in me. I cannot manage it by trying harder.
God, I am angry with you. I have nowhere else to take it, so I am bringing it here. If you can hold this without flinching, hold it. I would rather be angry in front of you than quiet a long way off.
The reason, the plan, the lesson someone is certain you are meant to be learning. Most of them meant well. It still landed badly, and you still had to be gracious about it.
Someone told me today what you are teaching me through this, and I smiled and said nothing. Take the sting out of it, Lord, before I go to bed. Keep me from repeating it back to myself at two in the morning as though it were true.
God, bless the ones who keep turning up. The one who does not ask how I am doing in that voice. The one who brought food and did not stay too long. Keep them, and let me be easy to love for another week.
I cannot stand at the front and give a testimony about this. There is no ending to report yet, Lord. Let there be room for me at the back with nothing to say, and let that be enough for now.
For the person you love who is in it, and for you, watching, unable to fix any of it. Partners, parents and carers can pray these ones too.
I would take this off them if I could. I cannot. So be with them, God, in the places I cannot reach, at night, in the scan room, in whatever they decide not to tell me. And keep me from saying something clever when I should just sit there.
God, I am saying their name to you. You know the rest.
I am tired in a way that sleep does not touch. Send someone real, Lord. An hour off, a person who will take a turn. Let me ask for help without feeling that I have failed the person I love.
What each passage meant where it was written, and what it does and does not offer you now.
For the Chief Musician; set to Aijeleth hash-Shahar. A Psalm of David. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? [Why art thou so] far from helping me, [and from] the words of my groaning?
Psalm 22:1–5: read the chapter
This is a song with a tune name attached and a place in the hymn book. The complaint was not smuggled in at the back. It was set to music and sung in public worship. Jesus says its first line from the cross. So when someone tells you that asking God why is a lapse of faith, the question is already in the prayers they are quoting from.
And he took him a potsherd to scrape himself therewith; and he sat among the ashes.
Before Job says a single thing worth putting on a card, he is sitting in ash scraping his sores with a piece of broken pot. His wife tells him to renounce God and die, and the book records it without piling on. The line people lift from here is his answer to her, that if we take good from God's hand we should take the bad as well, together with the note that he had not sinned in anything he said. That is chapter two, and it is not the whole book. From the next chapter on he curses the day he was born and demands an answer, and at the end it is Job, not his explaining friends, who is said to have spoken rightly. Their accounts of what he must have done to deserve it are not allowed to stand.
But as for me I know that my Redeemer liveth, And at last he will stand up upon the earth:
Job 19:23–27: read the chapter
This gets read at funerals as though it were the calm end of the story. It is not. Job is mid-argument, still unanswered, still covered in sores, and the same speech closes with his heart consumed within him. Hope here is not the absence of anguish. It is one line held on to while everything else is still wrong.
Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterfalls: All thy waves and thy billows are gone over me.
Psalm 42:5–11: read the chapter
The psalm asks its own soul why it is in despair, works its way round to an answer, and then asks the identical question again at the end. That repetition is the honest shape of a long illness. You talk yourself round in the morning, and by the evening you are back where you started, saying the same thing over.
And not only so, but we also rejoice in our tribulations: knowing that tribulation worketh stedfastness;
Romans 5:1–5: read the chapter
This is the sentence most often handed to people in hospital corridors, and it is doing something other than what they think. Paul is writing to a church already under pressure, describing what he has watched God do inside it. He is not saying your pain was issued in order to improve you, and he is not instructing you to feel glad about it this afternoon.
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 8:18–30: read the chapter
Two verses later comes the line about all things working together for good, which gets quoted at people as though it meant their suffering was secretly a good thing. Read what surrounds it. Creation is groaning. Believers are groaning. Nobody in the passage knows how to pray properly. The comfort offered is that your inarticulate groan is already being carried, not that the thing hurting you is fine.
[we are] pressed on every side, yet not straitened; perplexed, yet not unto despair;
2 Corinthians 4:7–18: read the chapter
Notice what Paul does not claim. He says he is not crushed, not in despair, not forsaken, not destroyed. He never says he is not pressed. Later in the same passage he calls it a light affliction, and that only makes sense because he is weighing it against eternity rather than against your Tuesday. Nobody else gets to call your affliction light on your behalf.
and he shall wipe away every tear from their eyes; and death shall be no more; neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain, any more: the first things are passed away.
Revelation 21:1–5: read the chapter
Written for churches under real pressure, not as a distraction from it. Notice what it does not say. It does not say the tears were unimportant, or that the pain was arranged on purpose. It says there are tears there to be wiped and that someone will do the wiping. It is a promise about the end. It is not a timetable for this year.
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 about endurance get used as instruments. Suffering produces perseverance becomes a reason not to complain. All things work together for good becomes a reason not to grieve. The saying about God never handing anyone more than they can carry is nowhere in the Bible, and anybody who has sat with real illness knows better. None of this means your pain is a lesson you are failing, or that faith is measured by how quietly you bear it. Asking for it to stop, and asking loudly, is what the Psalms actually do.
Pick one prayer from up there. Say it out loud once, badly if that is how it comes out, even if you feel nothing at all while you say it. Then put the phone down and do the next ordinary thing. Tomorrow, if you want it, say the same one again. Nothing here has to be finished today.
