When I first started doing this, I had a nagging feeling that prayer for a stranger was somehow lesser than prayer for someone I knew. Like the signal had to travel farther and might arrive weaker. I knew that wasn't theologically defensible, but feelings aren't theology.
What I've found, doing this for a few years now, is that it isn't lesser at all. It's different, and in some ways the difference goes in a direction I didn't expect.
When I pray for people I know well, there's always the risk of projection. I think I understand their situation, so I start editing the prayer toward what I think they need, which is really what I think I would need in their position. I fill in gaps. Sometimes that means I'm not really attending to them — I'm attending to my model of them.
With a stranger, I have almost nothing to project onto. If someone emails me and says their father is sick and they're afraid, that's what I have. I can't pad it out with assumptions. The prayer ends up being more spare, more honest. I hold what they gave me and I ask for help with exactly that.
There's something clarifying about the limits of it. I don't know the family history, the complicated feelings, whether the relationship is good or strained. I just know: this person is scared and their father is sick. I bring that to God as simply as I can. I've come to think of it as something like trusting that God fills in what I can't see.
Some requests are very specific. Someone once wrote to say she was taking a professional exam in three days that she'd already failed twice, and she was asking for peace, not for a different outcome. That specificity helped me. I knew exactly what to ask for. I prayed for her three days in a row and found myself genuinely hoping for her, a person whose last name I didn't know.
Other requests are vague in ways that feel intentional — someone who says they're going through a hard time and can't go into detail. I used to find that harder to work with. Now I think it might be the most honest kind of request. "I'm in over my head and I don't know how to name it" is a real thing to bring to prayer. I've been there myself.
The question I've mostly stopped asking is whether it counts. Whether the prayer of a stranger has any real weight. I've stopped asking because I don't think it's the right question. The act of sitting with someone else's specific need, holding it seriously, returning to it — that has its own integrity regardless of whether I can measure the outcome. And I can't.
What I can say is that it changes the person praying. Every time I receive a request, I spend some time with a stranger's life. I don't walk away from that unchanged. That seems like it means something, even if I can't say exactly what.