What not to write

The last chapter was about what to write. This one is shorter and matters more, because a weak prayer just underperforms — but a wrong one can do real damage to a person we may never get to repair it with.

Don’t diagnose or counsel

You have four lines of text and no context. You do not know whether the marriage in front of you involves an affair, an illness, or a lie somebody told twelve years ago. Advice built on a guess lands badly at best, and cruelly at worst.

“Have you considered that God may be teaching you patience?” is not a prayer, and the person on the other end has every right to resent it.

Don’t promise an outcome

Never write that God will heal this, will restore that, will bring her home. You do not know. When it doesn’t happen, the person is left believing that either God broke a promise or their faith wasn’t good enough — and a stranger handed them that.

Ask boldly. Ask for the healing, the job, the daughter’s return. Ask, and leave the answer with God. “I’m asking him to bring her home” is honest. “He will bring her home” is not yours to say.

Don’t preach

Nobody asked for a sermon, an explanation of suffering, or a summary of the gospel. If someone tells you their mother is dying and receives back a paragraph about eternity, they have learned that we treat pain as an opening. That memory lasts.

The gospel is coming. It comes through months of somebody being cared for, and then a real invitation to open a Bible. It does not need to be crammed into a four-sentence prayer.

Don’t correct their beliefs

Requests will arrive that are shaped by other religions, by folk practice, by superstition, by ideas about God you think are wrong. Some will ask for prayer for things you would never pray for on your own.

Pray for the person. Do not use the response to fix their theology — that conversation belongs to a relationship you do not have yet, and cannot start by correcting a stranger who came to you frightened.

Don’t ask questions or invite a reply

The channel is one-way by design, and the requester cannot write back to you. A question you can’t hear the answer to just reads as a door that closed.

Don’t identify yourself or your church

No name, no ministry, no city, no “praying for you from Tennessee.” Anonymity runs in both directions and the next chapter explains why. Sign nothing.

Don’t send a template

Copying the same prayer into ten requests saves ten minutes and costs the entire thing. People know. A prayer that could have been written without reading their request is exactly as valuable as no prayer at all — and if the system is doing the routing precisely so that a human being does the praying, a template quietly puts the machine back in the one place it was never supposed to be.

Recite this

No diagnosis, no promises, no sermon, no signature.

Try it this week

Read back the last three responses you wrote and mark every sentence that is not addressed to God.

If a sentence is talking to the requester instead of to God, ask whether it earns its place.