Prayers for Depression
Depression can make prayer feel impossible — not because faith is gone, but because everything is heavy. These prayers are short and honest. Several are laments, which is a form of prayer Scripture uses constantly and the church has never treated as unbelief.
If you can only manage a sentence, take a sentence. Saying it once counts.
7 prayers
- A Prayer in Depression
A contemporary pastoral prayer in the tradition of Psalm 42 and 88 — psalms the Church has always kept in its prayer book precisely because…
- A Prayer When Life Feels Unbearable
A contemporary pastoral prayer for moments of despair, grounded in Christ's own agony in Gethsemane and cry of abandonment from the cross.…
- Breaking the Spirit of Death
A prayer against what deliverance ministry calls "the spirit of death" — the settled interior orientation toward despair and…
- Jonah's Prayer from the Depths
Prayed from inside the great fish (Jonah 2:2–9), this is Scripture's clearest prayer of someone who ran from God and was rescued anyway.…
- Psalm 42 — Why Art Thou Cast Down, O My Soul
Psalm 42 is the Bible's clearest prayer of depression. Written by the sons of Korah, likely in exile far from the Temple, it describes a…
- Psalm 43 — O Send Out Thy Light and Thy Truth
Once joined to Psalm 42, this short plea to be led to God's holy hill was for centuries prayed by the priest at the foot of the altar…
- Psalm 88 — Lord, God of My Salvation
The darkest psalm in the psalter: it ends without resolution, with darkness as the psalmist's only companion. The Church prays it at…