Prayers for when you do not know what to pray
You do not have to be good at this. Some of these are three words long. That is a real prayer and it counts.
Maybe you sat down, or knelt, or just stopped still in the kitchen, and nothing came. Maybe you have not prayed in years and the whole thing feels like a language you never learned. Maybe you know exactly what is wrong and cannot make yourself say it out loud.
None of that puts you outside prayer. The Bible is full of people praying badly. Silently, angrily, in one broken sentence, at three in the morning. It keeps those prayers rather than tidying them up.
So start where you actually are. Say one line from below, or say a single word, or say nothing at all and stay a minute. You can come back later, when there is more to say, or when there is less.
18 prayers on this page, and 8 Bible passages with notes on what they mean.
When you have no words
For the moment you stop and nothing arrives. These are short enough to say on one breath. Say one of them, or say the same one four times.
Three words and nothing else
Lord, have mercy.
When nothing arrives at all
Nothing has come. I am not going to force it. I am going to sit here for a minute and let that be the prayer. You know what is in me, God. Read it for yourself.
Lend me the words
Lord, I do not know how to ask for what I need. I do not even know what to call it. Pray it in me. Let whatever is groaning in me be carried to you as it is, unpolished and unfinished.
Only the name, nothing more
Jesus. That is the whole prayer.
When you are too tired
For the end of a long day, or a long year. For people caring for someone, lying awake, or getting through work on almost nothing.
At the end of the day
I am worn through. I have nothing left to bring you and no strength to pretend otherwise. My heart is pounding and my strength has gone. Hold me while I sleep, Lord, and let tomorrow be its own problem.
Awake at four in the morning
It is four in the morning and the same thoughts are going round again. I am not going to solve any of it at this hour. Stay with me in the dark, God. If I cannot sleep, let me at least not be alone in it.
For the carer with nothing left
Lord, I have looked after them all day and I have run out. I am not asking to feel better about it. I am asking you to see that this is hard, and to be here while I do it again tomorrow.
Too tired to find words
I am too tired to pray. I have read this far and that is as much as I can manage tonight. Count it as the prayer and let me sleep.
When you are angry with God
For when the honest thing is a complaint. The Psalms do this constantly and nobody edits it out afterwards, so you do not have to be polite in here.
How long is this going on
How long, God. I have asked and asked and nothing has moved. I am tired of being patient about it and I am not going to pretend I understand. Here is my complaint. I am bringing it to you rather than carrying it away from you.
I do not want to talk
I do not want to talk to you at the moment. I am saying it to your face rather than going quiet on you. You know where I am.
Where were you in this
Where were you. I am not asking politely. I want an answer and I may not get one, and I am still here asking, which is more than I can explain to anybody.
Angry and still praying
God, I am angry with you. I am not going to pretend otherwise or make it sound better than it is. Take it as it comes.
When you cannot name it
For shame, for the thing you have told nobody, for when praying about it would mean admitting it. You can bring it without describing it. Some things will need saying to a person as well, when you can, and telling someone is not a failure of prayer.
The thing I will not say
You know the thing. I am not going to write it down or say it out loud tonight. I am telling you that it is there, and that I have not been able to tell anyone else. Be merciful to me.
Seven words at the back
God, be merciful to me, a sinner. That is all I have, and I am not going to dress it up into something better.
When you feel like a fraud
I do not feel like someone who should be praying. I have not done this in a long time and I am not sure I mean all of it. I am here anyway, Lord. Do whatever you do with people who turn up like this.
Praying for someone else
For when it is not your crisis but you are carrying it, and you have no idea what to ask for on their behalf.
For someone in the worst of it
I do not know what to ask for. I am holding their name up in front of you because I do not know what else to do. You know what they need better than I do, God. Be near them tonight.
Just their name, said aloud
Lord, here is their name.
When you cannot fix it
I want to fix this and I cannot. Keep me from making it about me. Let me be useful in small ways, and steady, and let them find you nearer than I can get.
Bible verses for when you cannot pray
What each passage meant where it was written, and what it does and does not offer you now.
the Spirit also helps our weaknesses, for we don’t know how to pray as we ought. But the Spirit himself makes intercession for us with groanings which can’t be uttered.
Romans 8:26–27
Paul writes this inside a passage about the whole creation groaning. Notice what he does not say. He does not say mature Christians pray well and beginners struggle. He says none of us knows how, and the Spirit carries what we cannot get out. It is sometimes quoted to mean you need not bother praying. It means the opposite: your fumbling attempt is already being carried.
Now Hannah spoke in her heart. Only her lips moved, but her voice was not heard. Therefore Eli thought she was drunk.
1 Samuel 1:9–18
Hannah wanted a child and had waited years for one. When she finally prayed, it made no sound, and the priest watching assumed she was drunk and told her off. So one of the Bible's fullest pictures of private prayer is a prayer that looked wrong to the professional in the room. If your praying does not look like praying, you are in old company.
You hold my eyelids open. I am so troubled that I can’t speak.
Psalm 77:1–12
Asaph is awake at night and has lost the ability to say anything at all. What follows is not a tidy recovery. He asks out loud whether God has forgotten to be gracious, and then decides to remember what God has done before, without claiming to feel any of it. Sleeplessness and speechlessness sit inside the songbook, not outside it.
Lord, all my desire is before you. My groaning is not hidden from you.
Psalm 38:9–10
This sits in a psalm of illness and exhaustion, where the writer's strength has gone and even his sight is failing. The claim is small and worth holding. Whatever you want and cannot say is already visible to God. You are not required to translate it into a proper request first. Groaning is not a failed prayer here. It is simply what is being heard.
Where these verses get misused
One thing gets used against people on this subject more than anything else. Passages about praying in the Spirit, or praying rightly, get turned into a test of how fluent you are, so that someone who stumbles gets told their faith must be thin. None of these passages say that. Being articulate is a skill some people have and others do not, and it has nothing to do with whether God is listening. If somebody has left you feeling your praying is not good enough to count, they were wrong.
Questions people ask
- does a one word prayer count
- Yes. The prayer Jesus commends in Luke 18 is seven words, and Hannah's made no sound at all. There is no minimum length anywhere in the Bible, and nothing in it suggests God grades on fluency. If all you can manage is a name, or the word help, that is a prayer. Say it as often as you need to, and stop when you have had enough.
- I sit down to pray and my mind goes blank
- Try not to fill the blank. It is usually tiredness, or dread, or the sheer size of the thing, and none of those are fixed by trying harder. Two things that tend to help: say something short and borrowed, a single line from a psalm, or set a timer for two minutes and simply stay. Prayer without words is still prayer. You are not obliged to produce material.
- is it wrong to pray the same words over and over
- No. Jesus warns about praying to be seen, and about piling up words in the hope of being heard for saying more of them. Then he immediately gives his disciples a fixed prayer to repeat. Christians in every tradition have repeated set prayers ever since. Repetition is often the thing that keeps people praying when they have nothing new to offer. Say the same sentence a hundred times if it is the true one.
- I have not prayed in years, how do I start
- Out loud or silently, in whatever words you would use with anyone else. You do not have to explain the gap first or apologise for it. There is no required posture, formula or building. If you want somewhere to begin, the tax collector's prayer in Luke 18 is a complete prayer on its own, and people have been saying it ever since.
- does it count if I do not feel anything
- Yes. Feeling is not the mechanism. Psalm 77 is written by a man who cannot speak and cannot feel God's kindness, and he prays anyway by recalling what he no longer feels. Numbness is common in grief, in exhaustion and in depression, and it is not evidence that you have done something wrong. Keep turning up. Warmth may come back and it may not, and its absence is not a report on how hard you have prayed.
So here is the small thing. Pick one prayer from this page, the shortest one you can stand, and say it once out loud before you put the phone down. Not a session. One sentence. If nothing else happens today, that happened, and it was a real prayer.