We pray for healing and for health (website only)

We pray for healing and for health;
for all who suffer in this world,
with minds that cannot bear its strains,
with bodies aching, full of pain.
Restoring God, we look to you,
bring healing to all people here.

For those whose bodies are diseased,
for lives reduced, by pain confined;
for those who’ve lost the use of limbs
through sickness, war or accident.
Restoring God, we look to you,
bring healing to all people here.

For those imprisoned in their minds,
obsessed, distrusting or depressed,
with twisting thoughts that can deny
reality and all its joys.
Restoring God, we look to you,
bring healing to all people here.

For those in tragedy and grief,
bowed down by all life’s carelessness;
for those whose lives have been destroyed,
diminished by society.
Restoring God, we look to you,
bring healing to all people here.

For those abused, abandoned, lost,
where hopelessness has taken root;
those who now seek to find relief
through taking drugs or harming self.
Restoring God, we look to you,
bring healing to all people here.

We pray for healing and for health
for all the world and for ourselves;
we need your blessing on our lives,
remould, re-make, and heal us now.
Restoring God, we look to you,
bring healing to us gathered here.

Words: © Andrew Brown, March 2019

Metre: 88 88 88

Tune: This hymn was written with Pater Omnium in mind (StF 562)

Ideas for use

Verses may be selected as appropriate, or they could be interspersed with silence or additional prayers.

More information

Andrew Brown is not alone in perceiving the need for more hymns that reflect our prayers "for healing and for health", not least in relation to poor mental health.

Our interview with URC hymn writer Jan Berry, More to say about healing, explores the idea that "there is very little material that responds to the fact that many of us do not experience healing in [a] direct ‘I am cured’ way'." See also Pain and passion in the hymns of William Cowper, who vividly expressed his own mental turmoil in hymn-poem form.

So Andrew's hymn is a welcome and significant contribution to the StF collection (printed and online). He recognises the full, diverse extent of healing that we seek, both as individuals and as a society; the very many situations in which "hopelessness has taken root" (v.5). Often those situations are overlooked by others. See, for example, the report of a 2019 study highlighting the impact on health that may result from the death of a close friend.

At the same time, Andrew also asserts that it is God's nature to "restore"; that God's dream for this world, and for us, is wholeness and connection - with God, with each other, and with our environment.

It is fundamental to our Christian hope, therefore, that we "look to God" to "bring healing to all people here".