PRAYERS FOR THE HARD HOURS

There is a moment in a hospital car park when you cannot make yourself walk in yet.

You are nine minutes early. The engine is off. You could go in. You are not going in, and you are giving yourself one more minute, and then one more.

Nobody writes prayers for that minute. Books of prayer are organised around the large categories - grief, anxiety, thankfulness, hope - and the large categories are never where you actually are. You are in a specific chair, in a specific building, at ten past three in the morning, holding a specific thing you cannot put down.

PRAYERS FOR THE HARD HOURS is a book of sixty prayers named after the situations themselves.

Not "a prayer for anxiety." A prayer for when you are in the waiting room and the doctor is forty minutes late. A prayer for when you find their handwriting in a drawer. A prayer for when you are lying next to someone who is sleeping fine. A prayer for when the casseroles stop coming. A prayer for when you have to say no and cannot make the word come out on its own.

Every prayer has the same four pieces:

- WHERE YOU ARE - a short, specific description of the moment, so you know the book has actually been there

- PRAY THIS - a real prayer, short enough to say out loud in a corridor, written to be said flat on the nights you feel nothing

- FROM THE BIBLE - one verse from the King James Version, given with book, chapter and verse so you can look it up and check it

- ONE LINE TO CARRY - a single sentence you can keep without a book in your hand

- AFTERWARDS - the practical thing a friend would tell you: write the questions down before you go in, eat something, put the phone across the room

The sixty prayers are grouped into six parts: the hours when you cannot sleep, the rooms where you have to wait, the days that ask too much of you, the table and the house and the people in it, the losses that have no words, and the small good hours - because a book that only contains hard hours has told you a lie about your life.

At the back there is a set of one-breath prayers for when there are only four seconds, and an index of verses arranged by what the hour feels like, printed in full so you do not need a Bible to hand.

A word about what this book does not do. It does not promise you an outcome. It does not promise sleep, or healing, or an answer by Thursday. It does not thank God for your loss on your behalf. It does not cite studies. And it does not pretend that prayer replaces a doctor, a counsellor or an emergency call - there is a page at the back that says so plainly, with numbers on it.

Written by a believer, not a minister. No credentials are claimed anywhere in these pages.

Short enough to be handed to somebody in a waiting room. Specific enough that when they open it, they will know that whoever wrote it had also sat there.