A Prayer for a Broken Marriage (When Love Feels Lost)

Maybe you are still sharing a bed and a mortgage with someone who feels like a stranger. Maybe the papers are already signed, or sitting in a drawer you can't quite open. Maybe you lie there at night going over the last argument, or the last ten years, trying to find the place it started to go wrong. You don't need me to tell you this is hard. You are living it.

A Prayer for a Broken Marriage (When Love Feels Lost)
Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels

The LORD is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit. (Psalm 34:18, ESV)

Bringing this to God

There is a particular kind of grief that comes with a marriage falling apart, because it is not one loss but many, layered on top of each other. You grieve the person you thought you married. You grieve the future you had planned. You grieve, maybe, your own part in how things got here. Some of that grief comes with guilt attached, and some comes with a fury you did not know you had in you. Scripture does not ask you to tidy any of that up before you bring it to God. Look at the Psalms. David does not arrive at prayer composed. He arrives furious, afraid, accusing, pleading, sometimes in the same breath. Psalm 34:18 was not written by someone untouched by disaster. It was written out of it. "The LORD is near to the brokenhearted," not the LORD is near once you've stopped being brokenhearted. In years of pastoral work, the question I get asked most around a struggling marriage is some version of "if I just pray harder, will this be fixed?" I cannot promise you that, and I would be lying to you if I did. God is not a technique for repairing what two people, or one, have damaged. Marriages are rescued through hard, unglamorous things: honest conversation, often professional counselling, sometimes separation for safety, sometimes years of slow rebuilding. Prayer does not replace any of that work. What it does is put you, as you actually are, in front of a God who does not flinch at the mess. He is near to the brokenhearted. That is not a sentiment. It is where He has always stood.

The prayer

Father, I come to You tonight with a marriage that feels like it is breaking, or has already broken, and I don't know how to pray about it without my own anger or grief getting in the way. So please receive me as I am.

Lord, You see what has happened between us. You know the words that were said that cannot be unsaid, and the silences that said just as much. You know my own failures in this, the ways I have been unkind, or absent, or unwilling to forgive. I bring those to You now and ask You to search me honestly, not so I can carry more shame, but so I can be free of what is mine to lay down.

I ask You to be near to my husband, or my wife, tonight, even if I cannot be. Soften what needs softening in both of us. Where there is a path back to each other, make it visible, and give us the courage to walk it even when it costs something. Where that path is not there, or is not safe, give me wisdom and give me people who can help me see clearly, because I do not trust my own judgment right now.

Guard me from bitterness, Lord, because I can feel it waiting. Guard my children, if I have them, from carrying what is not theirs to carry. And guard my heart from believing that this marriage, broken as it is, means You have turned away from me. You have not. You are near to the brokenhearted. Be near to me now, in Jesus' name, amen.

When you have no strength for more

Lord, You know what is broken here and I barely do. Be near to me tonight, the way Your word says You are near to the brokenhearted, because I have nothing else to bring You but this. Amen.

Verses to sit with

The LORD is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.

Psalm 34:18

This verse does not say God is near once you've recovered. It says He is near to the brokenhearted, present tense, right in the middle of it. If your marriage is crushing you tonight, you are not too much of a mess to be found by God. You are exactly who this verse was written for.

He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.

Psalm 147:3

Healing takes time, and this verse does not promise it will be fast. But it does promise it is His work, not something you have to manufacture by having enough faith. Some wounds from a marriage take years. God is not in a hurry to abandon that work.

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful... Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

1 Corinthians 13:4-7

This passage is painful to read inside a broken marriage, because it names exactly what's missing. Read it slowly, not as a verdict on who failed, but as a picture of what you can still ask God to grow in you, whatever happens with the other person.

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.

Romans 8:28

This is not a promise that your marriage will be saved. It is a promise that nothing, including this, puts you beyond God's reach or outside His purpose. Hold it loosely as hope, not tightly as a guarantee of a particular outcome.

Worth writing down

  • What have I been afraid to say honestly to God about this marriage, even in prayer?
  • Where am I carrying guilt that is actually mine to repent of, and where am I carrying shame that was never mine to carry?
  • Who, besides God, do I need to involve in this right now: a counsellor, a pastor, a doctor, a friend who will tell me the truth?
  • If I imagine this marriage in five years, what do I actually hope for, apart from what I fear?

If you want to go further

The Meaning of Marriage by Timothy Keller

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Read next, from the author

The Blood of the Twelve

Eleven of the twelve men who walked with Jesus died for refusing to say He stayed dead. This book follows what happened to each of them after the Gospels end: what the earliest sources record, what is tradition, and where the two part company. Written by Pastor Aguinaldo Santos, available on Kindle.

About the author

Written by Aguinaldo Santos, a Brazilian believer living in the United Kingdom. He writes Daily Faith Walk in the evenings, mostly about the things he is working through himself. Questions or a prayer request? Get in touch.

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