May 28, 2026
“So I say to Him, ‘God is it okay to luff strangers?’ And God says to me, ‘Yitzak, vat is dis strangers? You make strangers. I don’t make strangers.’”
— Holocaust survivor Yitzak, quoted by Rachel Naomi Remen in “Kitchen Table Wisdom”
About ten years ago when Bob was working in Manhattan, he got off the train in Grand Central Terminal and made his way through crowds of commuters to Lexington Avenue and onto Fulton Sheen Place near the Church of St. Agnes.
Suddenly, he found myself behind a young woman, walking and talking on her phone, who started sobbing, “I don’t know what I’m going to do! I don’t know what I’m going to do!”
Her agonized cries made him imagine a hundred tragic possibilities that could have brought her to such despair, one more painful than the next. And so he did the first thing that came to mind and uttered the words, “Jesus, help her. Jesus, please help her.”
It was his introduction to a practice as a spiritual EMT — praying for complete strangers, some of whom may not even understand the efficacy of prayer or have no one to pray for them. And it’s very apparent that the world is populated by people who need prayer. Correction: The world is overpopulated by people who need prayer.
The causes of their despair are many: a friend dies, a child dies, a spouse dies and the grief is debilitating. A relationship ends, a job is terminated, a mortgage can’t be paid, and a betrayal cuts to the heart. Loneliness, death, depression, mental illness, emotional abuse, physical abuse, a potentially fatal diagnosis. The list goes on and on, and should remind us of one certainty in this life: Everybody needs prayer.
So, if we’re only praying for people we love, including our family members and friends, we’re not doing enough praying. Jesus said to pray for our enemies, and he would probably add that we need to pray for complete strangers, for people we don’t even know.
©J Pisani
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