How to pray for someone who is sick (and what not to say)

The hardest thing about praying for someone who is ill is not finding words. It is resisting the urge to explain the illness, promise an outcome, or fill a silence that did not need filling. Most of the skill is in asking for the right things and then saying less than you want to.

Ask for more than a cure

Cure is the obvious request and it belongs in the prayer. But it is often not the most useful thing to name out loud, particularly when the person praying has no idea what the prognosis is and the person in the bed does.

Things that are almost always worth asking for:

• Sleep. Hospitals are loud and pain is worse at four in the morning.
• Relief from pain, specifically, as its own request.
• Clear information. A great deal of the suffering around illness is not knowing what is happening or when.
• Steady hands and clear judgement for the doctors, nurses and surgeons.
• Rest for whoever is doing the caring. The person who never gets prayed for is usually the one sleeping in the chair.
• That the person would not be alone in it.

The letter to the Colossians shows Paul praying for people he had never met, and what he asks for is strength and understanding rather than a change in circumstances. That is a usable model when you do not know the medical facts.

What James actually says, and what churches do with it

The New Testament passage behind most Christian practice around illness is short:

Is any among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the assembly, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord; and the prayer of faith will heal him who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. If he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. (James 5:14-15, read the chapter)

Every major tradition takes this seriously, and they do different things with it.

The differences are real and they are not the point at a bedside. If you are visiting someone from a tradition other than yours, ask what they would like rather than assuming.

Four people carrying a mat

One of the most quoted healing narratives is not about the sick man's faith at all.

Four people came, carrying a paralytic to him. When they could not come near to him for the crowd, they removed the roof where he was. When they had broken it up, they let down the mat that the paralytic was lying on. Jesus, seeing their faith, said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven you.” (Mark 2:3-5)

"Seeing their faith" — the friends'. The man is carried, lowered and spoken to. He does nothing. Whatever else this passage does, it establishes that other people can carry someone who cannot carry themselves, and that the carrying involved physical work and property damage.

Practically: the lift to the appointment, the meal left on the step, the sitting in the waiting room. Those are the roof coming off.

Five sentences to avoid

Every one of these is said constantly, usually by kind people.

• "If you had more faith, you would be healed." It is not what the texts show, and it puts the illness on the patient. Paul asked three times to be freed from something and was told no.
• "Everything happens for a reason." Job's friends spent thirty-five chapters on a version of this and were told at the end that they had spoken wrongly.
• "God needed another angel." People do not become angels in Christian teaching, and the sentence tells a grieving family their loss was a requisition.
• "I know exactly how you feel." You do not, and it turns the conversation around.
• "Just claim your healing." It presents recovery as a transaction the patient can complete, which is cruel when it does not work.

Job's friends did one thing right, at the very beginning: "So they sat down with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his grief was very great." (Job 2:13) The trouble started when they opened their mouths.

A short script for praying out loud at a bedside

If you are asked to pray and freeze, this shape takes forty seconds and asks nothing of the person in the bed.

1. Ask first: "Would you like me to pray with you?" Accept a no without a follow-up.
2. Name them: "God, this is Maria, and she is tired."
3. Ask for two or three concrete things: pain, sleep, tomorrow's results, her daughter.
4. Hand it over in one sentence: "We do not know how this goes. She is yours."
5. Stop. Do not summarise, do not preach, do not add a lesson.

Short is better. Someone in pain cannot follow a long prayer, and a bedside is not a service.

Chronic and invisible illness

Most writing about praying for the sick assumes an acute event with an end date. A great deal of illness is not like that: chronic pain, autoimmune disease, long-term mental illness, conditions that do not show on a person's face and do not resolve.

What people living with those describe wanting is different. Being prayed for repeatedly to be healed, month after month, can start to feel like being told that their ongoing existence is a problem to be solved — and, in the worst version, that the lack of a cure is their fault. Asking instead for a good day, for the appointment to go well, for the pain to be manageable this week, or simply staying in touch, lands very differently.

It also helps to keep asking after the first six weeks. Acute illness attracts a wave of prayer and casseroles that recedes; chronic illness carries on long after everyone else has moved on.

Praying with a terminal diagnosis

When cure is not coming, the prayer changes and does not stop. What people ask for then is usually time that is bearable, dignity, pain controlled, unfinished conversations finished, and courage for the family. It is entirely legitimate to keep asking for a cure at the same time — Scripture never treats persistence as impolite — but the other requests are the ones that are answerable day by day.

Prayer does not replace medical care

This needs saying plainly. Prayer is not a treatment, and nothing in this article is medical advice. Nobody should delay seeing a doctor, skip an appointment, stop a medication or change a prescribed treatment because of prayer, a prophecy, or a claim of healing. The traditions that anoint the sick all do it alongside medicine, not instead of it. If someone tells you that seeking treatment shows a lack of faith, that is not a mainstream Christian position, and it puts lives at risk.

For fixed texts, this site has a prayer for a sick person, a prayer for healing, a prayer before surgery and a prayer for grief, along with Bible verses about healing and verses for times of illness. Reading one out loud at a bedside is often easier than improvising, and it is not a lesser prayer.