Prayer is the most intimate act of a human life: it is direct communion with God.

In prayer, a person brings the deepest parts of themselves—need, fear, guilt, gratitude, joy, praise—and places them in the presence of the One who made them. It is where we say, “I can’t carry this alone,” and also, “I know Who gave me this.” It is surrender, confession, thanksgiving, and worship, spoken without performance.

But some prayers are offered publicly—written on tags, hung on crosses, placed on walls—where anyone walking by can see them. Like the Psalms, intimate petitions become shared liturgy, meant to be prayed by others.

I keep these public prayers.

My ongoing practice gathers handwritten prayers from public prayer spaces where people write knowing their words may be seen. With explicit consent, I keep those prayers—in the writer’s own hand—and preserve them. The handwriting itself is evidence: proof that a specific person stood at a specific moment and spoke to God. Each mark is unique—shaky or steady, hurried or careful—the only unrepeatable element in work otherwise defined by simplicity and restraint. Each prayer, whether it’s a plea for healing, a confession, a thank you, or pure praise, is housed in a physical work—preserved not as artifact but as ongoing petition. The original text is not treated as scrap. It is preserved as witness that a human being entered communion with God.

The work does not end at preservation. It is handed forward.

When someone encounters the piece and reads the prayer, they are asked to take it up as their own before God. One person’s grief, relief, longing, gratitude, or worship becomes something another person now agrees to carry.

The piece is not only the object. The piece is the exchange.

These works function as reliquaries, records, and assignments. They honor the intimacy of a conversation with God and refuse to let that conversation be discarded or forgotten. This practice stands against the instinct to keep suffering, hope, and gratitude private and personal. Instead, it asks us to carry one another. It insists that prayer is not something that evaporates. It endures, and we bear it together.