I began writing collect prayers, or what is simply called a “collect,” on March 15, 2020—the day that our country shut down on account of the coronavirus. At first, it was simply a way for me to cope with my own fears over an uncertain future. I’d written such prayers here and there, and I’d assigned them over the years to my students at Fuller Theological Seminary, but I now wrote them as a kind of daily spiritual exercise, and a rather desperate one.

I wrote a prayer titled “Against the Pestilence that Stalks in the Dark,” giving voice to the language of Psalm 91, which prior to Covid-19 may have felt like something that only medieval Europeans suffering from the bubonic plague would have understood, but which now made immediate sense to us as a twenty-first-century global people. The archaic language of the King James Bible never felt so apt:

I wrote a prayer “For Dashed Plans” because it became increasingly obvious that there would be plenty of those to deal with in the months to come, resulting for some in bitter disappointment, for others in relief, grateful that they no longer needed to organize anything, at least for the foreseeable future.

I wrote prayers “For Beleaguered Parents,” among whom I counted myself, and “For Anxious Children,” including my own, who often lacked the capacity to verbally name the jumble of feelings that roiled beneath the surface of their conscious understanding. I wrote a prayer “For the Depressed” after hearing of the experiences of the elderly, like my uncle, trapped in their nursing home rooms, confused and afraid; and of single people who lived alone in their apartments without any opportunities for meaningful physical touch from others.

I also wrote a prayer “Against Neighbor Hate” after the 2020 election, hoping it might arrest an impulse that had become all too easy to indulge for many of us in America.

For me, the writing of such prayers became a way to make sense of the realities of our world in upheaval.

In time, I began to receive messages from both friends and strangers, often through social media, requesting prayers on behalf of people who deserved our very best intercessions: “For Grocers Managing Panic-Buying Shoppers,” “For Medical Professionals Overwhelmed by the Countless Sick,” “For Garbage Collectors Working Overtime,” and “For Untimely Deaths.”

When schools began to open their doors again, my bishop asked if I might consider writing a series of “Back to School Prayers,” which I did, keeping in mind the unique challenges faced not only by students but also by teachers and administrators. I published a separate batch of “Prayers for a Violent World” because our world had turned increasingly savage.

With my wife, Phaedra, a visual artist, I conceived a series of illustrated prayers that might allow people to pray not just with words but also with images—to see the shape of sorrow, to imagine the texture of death, or to perceive the beauty of feet that chose to publish peace instead of hate. For this particular venture, Phaedra and I created three sets of prayer cards for the Rabbit Room, a marvelous organization committed to cultivating creativity through community and artmaking.

Often after posting my prayers on social media, I found that they resonated with people across denominational and political lines. They gave voice, it seemed, to things many Christians believed God would never be interested in. My hope, of course, was to persuade readers otherwise—that God was, in fact, interested in hearing everything that we have to say to him in prayer.

God cares little about whether we get our prayers “right” or whether we tidy up our lives prior to making our intercessions known. True piety, as the psalmists repeatedly suggest, ought not to be a precondition for talking to God. Showing up is all that’s needed, as well as a commitment to being brutally honest with God—honest about our doubts, honest about our anger about unanswered prayers, honest about the failures and fears we might be ashamed to admit out loud, among others.

Stanley Hauerwas puts the point this way in his book of prayers, Prayers Plainly Spoken:

All aspects of our lives must be prayed, then, lest we become atheists in the quotidian parts of our lives because we have come to believe that these parts are, in fact, godless, devoid of God’s interest and care. But that is not the kind of God we encounter in the Psalms, nor in the life and ministry of Jesus, whom the book of Hebrews calls the true Pray-er. He is the infinitely gracious one who eagerly welcomes our whole selves, along with all the details of our lives.

Around the two-year anniversary of the shutdown of our world that Covid-19 demanded of us, I discovered that I had written close to four hundred collect prayers. It was at this point that I wondered whether they might become a book of their own. The editors at InterVarsity Press believed that they could, and for that I am deeply grateful.