How to make a prayer wall
that isn’t a mural

Search for how to make a prayer wall at home and you get photographs of finished ones. A verse in vinyl script, a gallery of frames, a map with pins, a word painted above the doorway. They are lovely and they are murals. Nothing on them is going to change next week, and that is the problem — because a prayer wall that works is closer to the job board in a workshop than to anything you would frame. It is where the things you are carrying stand in front of you so that you stop having to remember them.

If nothing has come down in a month, it isn’t a prayer wall. It’s wallpaper.

What a wall does that a journal doesn’t

I keep a journal, and a journal is private and runs in a line. Yesterday’s page is behind today’s, and the request I wrote down in March is forty pages back where I will not see it. A prayer box is the opposite motion — you write a card, put it in, close the lid, and the closing is the point. Neither of them is any good at the one job a wall is for: holding the handful of things I keep forgetting to pray about in the place where I will actually be standing.

That is the whole function. A wall is external memory. It is also the only one of the three that everyone in the house can see, which is both the reason to have one and the reason to be careful with it, and most of this page is about that.

Some of the links below are paid, sponsored links — I earn a commission if you buy through them, at no extra cost to you. Mine is a cork board that came from an office supply store years ago and a pack of index cards; I have not used every product named here, and where I haven’t I say so and speak only to the manufacturer’s listing. You can start this with a wall, some paper and tape.

Put it where you already stand

The hallway wall is theater. It is where a prayer wall looks best and does least, because nobody stops in a hallway. Put the board within arm’s reach of wherever you already pray, at the height your eyes are when you are there.

For me that is beside the chair in the corner of the bedroom, hung low enough that I am reading it sitting down. If you have a prayer closet, the inside of the door is the best wall in the house — it is private, it is at eye height when you are kneeling or sitting on the floor, and it shuts. For a family it is the side of the fridge or the wall next to the table, because that is the only place everyone passes every day with their hands free.

The test is simple. If you have to walk somewhere to read it, you will stop reading it inside two weeks, and then you have a mural.

One card, one request, one date

Cards, not writing on the wall. The reason is that a card can move, and moving is the thing the wall has to be able to do. Each request gets its own card with a name, one sentence, and the date you wrote it in the corner. Add the answer date underneath when it comes and take the card down. That is the same rule that makes a prayer box a prayer box instead of a drawer, and it matters more here because the wall is in plain sight.

Which brings up the thing nobody says. A prayer wall in a house is public in that house. Your children read it, your mother-in-law reads it, the plumber reads it. Write what you would be content for any of them to read: a name and “the surgery on the 14th,” not the prognosis. The same discipline that keeps other people’s private business out of a journal is non-negotiable on a wall, and it has a side benefit — a six-word card gets written, where a paragraph gets put off.

Paid link · #ad

Paid link · #ad

Cap it at twelve

This is the mechanism, and I have not seen it on any other page about prayer walls. A wall that has room for everything holds nothing, because your eye slides across forty cards the way it slides across a noticeboard in a church lobby. Twelve cards for one person is about what you can take in at a glance and about what you can honestly pray through in a sitting.

The limit does the work. When the thirteenth request arrives, one card has to come down, and you have to decide which. Has it been answered — take it down and date it. Have you quietly stopped praying for it — then be honest about that, take it down, and put it in the box or the binder where it can wait without reproaching you. An open-ended wall lets you avoid that decision forever. The cap forces it weekly, and the weekly deciding is most of what makes the wall a practice rather than a display.

A family needs more than twelve, obviously. Roughly a dozen per person who prays at it, which is why the size of the board is decided by how many people stand in front of it and not by the size of the wall.

The board

Cork, framed, and plain. A framed cork board is the right tool for the same reason it has been on the wall of every workshop and staff room for a century: pins go in and out of it hundreds of times and it does not care. Felt boards and wire grids are prettier in a photograph and worse at the job — felt holds a pin loosely and a wire grid needs clips, which is one more thing to find at six in the morning.

Two sizes make sense. A 17×23 board holds about twelve 3×5 cards with air between them, which is one person’s wall. A 2×3 foot board holds a family’s, and it is the size I would buy for a kitchen wall. Black frames read as furniture; the unfinished oak ones read as a classroom. Mount it so the top edge is at your eye height standing, or the middle at eye height sitting if it lives beside a chair.

Paid links · #ad

Paid link · #ad

If you rent, or don’t want holes

A framed cork board is light, and the lighter of the two above hangs on adhesive picture strips without a nail. Check the board’s weight on its listing against the rating on the strips and go a size up; they come off a painted wall clean when you move out, which is the whole reason to use them. The longer version of the renting question is on the page about praying in a room that isn’t yours.

Or skip the board. A length of twine between two adhesive hooks, with mini clothespins to hold the cards, is a prayer wall that weighs nothing, costs very little and fits inside a closet door or along the top of a headboard. The cards hang, they move, they come down. It is also the version a teenager will actually put up in a shared room.

Paid links · #ad

With a family

This is where a wall beats every other method, because a child cannot keep a journal and will not open a box, but will walk past the fridge forty times a day. Give each person a pen or a card color and let the small ones draw. Date the cards yourself in the corner.

Then pick one moment a week — Sunday evening, after the dishes — when cards come down together and someone says plainly what happened. Not a tally. The moment the answered cards become a score, the ones still up become losses, and children can read a scoreboard before they can read. That is the same rule that governs memory work with children, and it is the one thing that will quietly end a family wall if you get it wrong.

Where the cards go when they come down

Not in the trash. A card that comes down is the most valuable thing the wall has produced — it is a dated request with a dated outcome in your own hand — and a wall that throws those away is forgetting on purpose. Two places work. The answered section of a prayer box, if you keep one, where the card sits as it is. Or write it up properly in a few sentences before the whole thing fades into a date and a line of handwriting, which is what the wall itself cannot do.

Paid link · #ad

Four ways a prayer wall dies

It gets made pretty first. The lettering, the frame, the matching cards. By the time it looks right you have spent the energy that should have gone into the first twelve cards, and you are reluctant to pin a scrappy one on something that nice.

It goes in the hallway. See above. Beside the chair or inside the door, or it is decor.

It is never capped. Forty cards is a noticeboard. The eye stops reading a noticeboard in about a week.

Nothing ever comes down. Which is the real one. A wall where cards only go up is a record of what you were worried about, not of what God did about it — and the second record is the only one worth having on a wall.

Common questions

What do you put on a prayer wall?

One request per card: a name, one sentence, the date. Only what you would be content for anyone in the house to read. And fewer cards than you think — a dozen for each person who prays at it.

Where should a prayer wall go?

Within arm’s reach of wherever you already pray, at the height your eyes are when you are there. Beside the chair, inside the closet door, or on the fridge for a family. Not the hallway.

Do I need a cork board?

No. A line of twine and clothespins does the same job and leaves no mark, and the inside of a cupboard door with tape works on day one. Cork is simply the surface that still takes a pin cleanly after the three-hundredth one.

What do you do with the answered cards?

Date the answer, take the card down, and keep it — in the answered section of a prayer box or written up in a journal. The wall is for the asking. Something else has to hold the thanks, or it evaporates.

Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it. Habakkuk 2:2