On a college campus, finding a place for peace and quiet can be difficult. Right through the doors of the lower chapel entrance, there is a door with a plaque that reads “Alone with God.” The “Alone with God” room, also known as the prayer room, is a room specifically created to give students that place of peace. 

“It’s a space designated for individual or group prayers, where you can be uninterrupted,” Mallorie Miller, the Assistant Director of Christian ministry said. “It can be really hard to find a place where you can be alone, uninterrupted and find quiet, so this can be a place for that. Students can kind of come and go as they please to use this space for connecting to God and each other.”

The prayer room is a small dimly lit room, with seating and shelves holding a variety of things from markers to books. The thing that really makes the prayer room different, is that the walls are covered in writing.

“It’s also a room that is literally covered in prayer,” Executive Director of Christian Ministry, Jason Barnhart said. “I mean, the walls. People write prayers all on the walls.”

Barnhart believes this helps students relate to each other and the problems they may be going through. 

“When you walk in it’s really neat because prayer moves from just being an individual journey to being a collected experience,” he said. “You know you start sensing ‘Okay, God’s doing a bigger work here that I’m a part of it. Some of the feelings I may be feeling are not unique to me’ and you find solidarity in prayer.”

Students have found comfort in the prayer room not only through the writings on the wall, but through meeting with each other in solitude. 

“One time we used it we went in a small group,” sophomore Lexi Fraelich said. “We had a meeting and then a couple of us went into that room and we discussed over things by ourselves and it was nice because not a lot of people walk up and down those stairs, so we were just kind of alone with each other and God.”

Meeting in small groups has been a constant occurrence both currently and in past years. It allows for students to speak openly with each other without the fear of getting interrupted or overheard.

“I know that small groups, historically and currently meet there as well, if they’re especially looking for privacy,” Miller said. “Some small groups try to foster high levels of transparency where students can just be bluntly honest about what they’re experiencing in life and common spaces on campus can be difficult to have that level of transparency there so small groups will a lot of times meet in that space.”

According to Miller, the prayer room has been around since the chapel was built, but got a bit of a revival back in 2004. 

There was a global prayer movement happening where college campuses would dedicate a week to praying twenty four hours a day. Students would sign up for shifts in the prayer room, so that someone would be praying every hour of everyday for an entire week. 

“They updated the room, it used to be a lot more formal and so they made it a little more informal, a little more comfortable, they painted the walls so that students could write prayers directly on the walls,” she said. “For years those events would happen, once a semester, once a year, more students would take a week and just pray constantly for a week, each taking shifts and then getting creative in expressions.”

For over a decade the prayer room has been around helping students connect with their faith and feel less alone in their problems. 

Whether students are heavily in touch with their spirituality, or just exploring it for the first time, the prayer room is a good place to go to find comfort and solidarity.

“I think it truly helps students because some people just want to get away and knowing that there’s a special room like made specifically for that is great,” Fraelich said. “If they’re not super open about their faith or religion, they can just kind of go in there and be free. It helps them know that other people are with them because of all those writings on the wall.”