How to Pray With Someone Who Is Suffering When Words Feel Inadequate

There are moments of suffering so large that words — even the practiced words of prayer — feel inadequate. Someone is in the hospital and the prognosis is terrible. A friend has just received news that dismantles everything. A family is in the first hours of a loss that has no good shape yet. And you've been asked to pray, or you want to pray, and you don't know what to say to God about something this large.

The tradition of prayer has something to say about this, and it's more permission-giving than most people realize.

Honest prayer is better than eloquent prayer

You don't need the right words. You need the true ones. A prayer that says "God, I don't know what to say. I'm here with my friend who is suffering and I don't understand this and I'm bringing them to you anyway" is a more honest prayer than a carefully worded petition, and honesty before God is the whole of what prayer asks.

The Psalms — the prayer book of the Hebrew Bible, central to both Jewish and Christian prayer — are full of this: lament, confusion, accusation, grief brought before God exactly as it is rather than cleaned up for presentation. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" is a prayer. It's not composed or resolved or theologically tidy. It's real. Real prayer in suffering is allowed to look like that.

Silence is also prayer

Sitting in silence with someone who is suffering, having announced that you're going to pray, is a legitimate form of prayer. Many traditions recognize contemplative silence as a form of communication with the divine that words can interrupt rather than deepen. If words don't come, you don't have to force them. Being present in silence, holding the person and the situation before God in your heart without speaking — that's prayer. Let it be that.

Ask what they need from the prayer

Before you pray, if there's space to ask, find out what the person needs. "Is there something specific you want me to bring to God for you?" gives them a voice in what the prayer is for. Sometimes they'll tell you something specific — healing for a particular thing, strength for a particular day. Sometimes they'll say "just be with me." Either answer orients the prayer toward what they actually need.

The prayer doesn't have to be long. It doesn't have to be eloquent. It has to be true, and it has to be for the person you're with, offered in care and honesty from whatever certainty and uncertainty you carry. That's enough. It's actually everything that prayer in hard moments is ever asked to be.