Prayers for difficult times

Prayers for the seasons of life when nothing is easy.

There are stretches of life when nothing is going well, and the Christian tradition has carried prayers for those stretches across every century since the Psalms were first written. The prayers gathered here are for difficulty itself: the prayers said in financial trouble, in long illness, in family rupture, in personal failure, and in the kind of grief that does not resolve quickly. They are the prayers of people who have been through worse than the petitioner is going through now and have left their words behind so the next person does not have to find their own. The tradition's answer to difficulty is not optimism. It is endurance, grounded in trust, accompanied by the prayers of those who came before.