Prayer for healthcare workers: those who keep watch

There is a moment in hospital that everyone knows. Visiting hours are over. You put your coat back on, you say see you tomorrow, you look for one more sentence to leave on the bedside table. And then you go. In the corridor a nurse walks the other way, a tray in her hands. She is the one who stays.

We pray a great deal for the sick, and rightly. We think less about the people we leave them with. The care assistant who will do the morning wash, the night nurse, the porter, the person who changes the sheets without anyone looking up. They are the ones who keep watch while we sleep. A prayer for healthcare workers starts there: noticing that, every evening, without saying so, we are entrusting someone to them.

”Take care of him”

We usually read the parable of the Good Samaritan for its hero. A man is left half dead by the road, two passers-by keep their distance, the third one stops. But the story does not end on the road.

[He] came to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. He set him on his own animal, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. On the next day, when he departed, he took out two denarii, and gave them to the host, and said to him, “Take care of him. Whatever you spend beyond that, I will repay you when I return.”

Luke 10:34-35 (World English Bible)

The Samaritan does not stay. He has his own road. The next day he does what all of us do when visiting hours end: he hands the wounded man over to someone else. And in passing, the parable keeps a character nobody ever talks about. The innkeeper. He has no name. He did not find the man on the road, he did not make the fine gesture. He received two coins and an instruction, and he carried on: the nights, the dressings, the days when nothing happens.

That is where the people who care for our loved ones stand. They arrive after the emergency and stay after we leave. “Take care of him”: it is the sentence we say to them, or think very hard as we go through the door. Praying for them means saying it again before God, and this time adding their names.

A prayer for healthcare workers

Here is a prayer written for this page. It can be said as you leave a hospital room in the evening, or as you think of someone starting their shift.

Lord, I entrust to You the ones who keep watch when I go. The hands that care through the night, the footsteps in the corridor, the patience of gestures done a hundred times over. Keep them from the tiredness that hardens and the sadness that piles up. Give them what they give: attention, a little rest, and someone who thinks of them.

If you work in healthcare yourself, you can say it in the plural, for the team, as your shift begins. Nothing in it needs to change.

The hours no one sees

Psalm 121 has a line we often say for ourselves: “Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep” (Psalm 121:4). Psalm 121 is a psalm for the road, the psalm of the traveller who lifts up their eyes. But this verse also says something about the night shift. In their own measure, they do what the psalm keeps for God: they stay awake while everyone else sleeps.

No one can hold that for long without help. Praying for a healthcare worker is not wishing them courage from a distance. It is a reminder that the watch is not theirs alone. The one who does not sleep also watches over the one who is watching. It can be said in a single line: keep them tonight.

And there is what no one sees by day. The weariness, the deaths that are not talked about at home, the anxious families who aim their anger at the wrong person. In the prayer after surgery, one line already asked: “Bless the hands that cared for me, the ones I never saw.” This page follows on from it. The hands we never saw are often the most numerous.

Those who made care a prayer

Christian history counts many caregivers, and few spectacular heroes among them. John of God, in the sixteenth century, rented a house in Granada and carried the sick to it on his back. Then he went begging for them in the streets. His first companions remembered the cry he used: “Do good to yourselves, brothers, for the love of God.”

Florence Nightingale, during the Crimean War, made her rounds alone at night between the beds of the hospital at Scutari, a lamp in her hand. The English press reported it, and the image stayed. Behind the reformer there was a very simple conviction: to serve the sick was to serve God.

And Hanna Chrzanowska, a nurse in Kraków in the twentieth century, built up home care for people no one went to see, while she was ill herself. She taught her students to look at every patient as a whole person, body and soul.

None of the three cared for the sick in order to be seen. That is exactly why it is worth praying for those who resemble them today.

One step: learn a name

Next time you walk onto a ward, read the badge. Remember one first name, the evening nurse or the care assistant who smiled. Say it as you leave, simply: thank you, Claire. Thank you, Karim.

Then, in the evening, carry that name into your prayer. One is enough. It is a thank-you they will never see, and that may be what makes it right. If you keep a prayer journal, write it down. You will see how many names gather in a single hospital stay.

We always entrust someone to someone. Better to do it knowingly, and to pray for them both.