How to Pray When You Do Not Know What to Say

There is a specific kind of stuck that most men will recognise. You mean to pray. You have set aside the time. And what comes out is either a list of requests that sounds like a service ticket, or nothing at all.

So you conclude you are bad at it, which is not an unreasonable conclusion, and the next attempt is a fortnight away.

Almost all of that rests on one assumption worth examining: that prayer is a performance with a standard, and you are below it.

Nobody in Scripture is fluent

The disciples had been with Jesus for a considerable time before one of them asked him how to do this. Men who had watched him pray daily still had to ask.

What he gave them was short. Under a minute, spoken plainly. No warm-up, no vocabulary, and — worth noticing — no requirement to feel anything first.

Elsewhere the record is franker still. There is a father who tells Jesus outright that he believes and does not believe at once, and asks for help with the gap. There are psalms that accuse God of being asleep. Psalm 88 ends without resolving, and it was kept in the songbook anyway.

If Scripture’s own examples include a man saying “I do not have enough of this, help me,” the bar you have set is higher than the one in the book.

The words are not the point

Two things worth knowing, because they take most of the pressure off.

Romans says the Spirit intercedes when we do not know what to pray — the not-knowing is anticipated, and provided for. And Jesus warns specifically against thinking we will be heard for our many words. Length is not the currency.

Which means a man muttering three sentences on a commute is not doing a lesser version of prayer. That is prayer. The polished paragraph was never the target.

Four patterns for when you are stuck

None of these require you to feel anything to begin.

Pray a psalm, out loud. The oldest solution and still the best. When you have no words, use words that are already there — Psalm 23 when you are depleted, Psalm 27 when you are afraid, Psalm 51 when you have done something you regret, Psalm 103 when you want to be grateful and cannot get started. Read it slowly enough to mean it. It stops being recitation somewhere around the third line.

Say the true thing, not the appropriate thing. If what is actually in your head is I am furious with my brother and I do not want to forgive him, that is the sentence to start with. Prayer that begins with a tidied-up version of your state is a conversation with someone you are managing. The psalms are full of men saying things they would not put in a card.

Use the shape Jesus gave. His model prayer has an order: who God is, what should happen, what you need today, what you owe and are owed, what you want steering clear of. That is five prompts. Take one a minute and you have five minutes without needing to invent a structure.

Pray the list, then stop. Some mornings the honest content is a list of names and worries. Say them, plainly, and then be quiet for a minute rather than filling the space. The quiet is not the failure of prayer. Often it is the part that does the work.

What about not feeling anything

You will pray for long stretches and feel nothing, and that says less than you think.

The men and women who have written most seriously about prayer across the centuries describe the same thing — extended periods with no sense of anything at the other end — and none of them treat it as evidence of failure. Several describe it, looking back, as the season that formed something an easier one could not.

Feeling is not the receipt.

When it is not a spiritual problem

Worth saying plainly. If everything has gone flat — not just prayer, but food, people, work, things you used to enjoy — and it has held for more than a couple of weeks, that is a recognised pattern and it responds to treatment.

Talk to your doctor. Trying to pray your way out of an illness is a slow route to the place a decent GP could get you to faster, and there is nothing unspiritual about taking the shorter road.

The smallest possible start

If you want one thing to do tomorrow: read Psalm 23 out loud, slowly, and then sit for one minute without adding anything.

That is a complete act of prayer. It requires no fluency, no particular mood, and about ninety seconds. Most of the men who pray regularly started with something roughly that size, and the size is not what changed.