Intercessory prayer has begun to feel less like drafting petitions and more like tending a small, steady fire. What does it mean to pray for someone, especially when we are begging for healing, for remission, for a miracle that will quiet a diagnosis of body, mind, or spirit? Lately I find myself praying without much pause. For my brother and sister in law. For a dear friend and former colleague. For families caught in the grinding gears of immigration politics, where policy becomes personal in the most intimate and frightening ways. The prayers rise up almost on their own, like breath in cold air.

And as they do, I am beginning to see that intercessory prayer is not a lever we pull to move heaven. It is a way of standing in love. It is how we choose to be in relationship, with God and with one another.

I once heard someone say they did not believe in God and could not see the point of prayer. I tried to explain that when I pray for someone, I am holding them in my heart. Not fixing them. Not scripting their future. Just holding them. Steadily. Tenderly. Sometimes that holding is the prayer itself, a quiet interior vigil that does not clock out.

And while I hold them, I trust that God holds us all. Not with tight fists, but with an embrace wide enough for our fear, our anger, our illness, our questions. There is nothing in that posture about control. There is everything about love.

Perhaps that is why I pray. To love beyond what I can see. To hope when outcomes are uncertain. To place the people I cherish into a mercy larger than my own. Prayer becomes less about changing God’s mind and more about softening mine, so that I can remain faithful, and keep entrusting us all to God’s extravagant, unguarded heart.