A prayer for strength

The prayer

God, I am worn through.

I have been holding this together for longer than I can account for, and I do not know how much is left. I am not asking to be impressive about it. I am asking you to hold the part I cannot.

Where I have mistaken exhaustion for faithfulness, show me. Where I have been carrying something you never handed me, help me set it down.

Be the strength of my heart when my heart is the thing that is failing.

Amen.

Why this prayer does not ask to be made unbreakable

Search for a prayer for strength and most of what comes back asks for the same thing: more capacity. Power to push through, endurance to outlast, a spine stiffened for the week ahead. That is a reasonable thing to want, and there is nothing false about praying it.

It is worth noticing, though, that it is not usually what the passages underneath those prayers are offering.

Paul asked three times for his affliction to be taken away. The answer he records is not that he would be given enough strength to bear it well. It is that the power he was after was completed in exactly the weakness he wanted removed. Whatever that means, it is not advice to try harder.

Isaiah’s promise turns up on a great deal of wall art, and the condition attached to it is easy to read past. The renewal belongs to those who wait. Not those who persevere, not those who push on — those who wait, which is the harder instruction, and a strange thing to be told at 2am.

And the psalmist, writing at the end of his rope, does not hedge. His heart fails. He says so plainly, and then says God is the strength of it anyway. Both halves are allowed to be true at once.

What to do with that when you are tired

None of this makes the week lighter. It does change what you are asking for.

If strength means being made equal to the load, the prayer becomes a request to be a better version of the person who is already struggling — and if it is not answered the way you hoped, the failure looks like yours.

If strength is what these passages describe, the request gets smaller and steadier — being held while you are breakable. That prayer is harder to feel disappointed by, because it does not depend on you becoming someone else first.

The tiredness is real either way. You are allowed to say so out loud, which is most of what the prayer above is doing.

If you came here for strength to keep going, that prayer is honest and God is not put off by it. But you may find, as the psalmist did, that what arrives is not the power to carry more. It is the sense that you were not the one holding it up.