Prayers During a Pandemic: For Those who Feel Anxious

Our family is taking time daily to pray about the current global health crisis. Our prayers will likely reference the Christian tradition, but we’ve written with an ecumenical and agnostic audience in mind.

If you’d like us to pray for you, let us know. If you’d like us to write a prayer for you or for a concern you have and share it here, just ask. You don’t have to share your name if you don’t want to, and we won’t share it or any other identifying details about you here or elsewhere.

Today, we are focusing our prayer on those who feel anxious during this time of tumult.

Today we think of all those who are anxious, those who are fearful and whose hearts are burdened and troubled. We think of those whose worry rises and falls with new reports of illness, and we think of those who experience near-constant anxiety. We think especially of those with anxiety-related disorders and medical PTSD and those who have already lost loved ones to viruses and whose grief is exacerbated by this pandemic. Our hope for them is peace of heart, rest that renews, and respite in the love of friends.

We pray for those we don’t know. We pray for those we do, including [names of people you know who are experiencing anxiety, including yourself]. We pray for those around them, that they are compassionate to their friends who suffer. We pray for continued strength for those who are already strong, that they can shoulder what others cannot with grace and patience.

We seek to lift the burden of worry for those we know and those we don’t know. We pray that the fears we see in others will move us to press for justice. When we ourselves are fearful, we do not ask to be unafraid but to be brave.

We trust that we are not alone, even when we are afraid, but know that others will catch us in their love when we fall into fear.