By Brad Brandt

Editor’s note: This article is an excerpt from Help! I Live with Chronic Pain, recently published by Shepherds Press.

You may not need this article today. You may not need it this week, this year, perhaps even this decade. But I’m convinced of this. If you live long enough in this sin-cursed world, the day will come when you will need what you are about to read.

I’m talking about how to pray when you are in pain. Not a little pain either. I have in mind the kind of pain that consumes you to the point where you can’t think about anything besides the pain. It could be physical pain. It could be some other type of pain. Perhaps you’ve lost your spouse or beloved child. Maybe you worked all your life for a dream job, and now it’s gone.

The point is, your pain is connected to a very significant loss. We’re not talking about having a bad day. We’re talking about going through something you never anticipated in life, and the result is a pain for which you have no category. Intense, relentless, deep, consuming pain.

And to complicate things, you’re not sure what to pray anymore. It’s not because you don’t love God, for you do. And it’s not because you don’t pray, for you have prayed, many times in fact. But every time you say amen and get up off your knees, you realize your situation hasn’t changed.

Yet the pain remains.