Hi, I'm Eric.

I grew up in the early 80s in a home full of unconditional love. We had little money, but I didn't know it. I had what I needed, and my imagination filled in the rest.

I also grew up Mormon. I'm not anymore — and that matters to this story.

Despite kindness being a core value of mine, the faith I was raised in gave me judgments I didn't fully recognize until much later. I was taught, implicitly and explicitly, that everyone outside our tradition was wrong. I was raised to be homophobic and to see anyone who did not "fit the mold" as bad or even gross. Looking back, that's a painful thing to sit with.

In my 30s I finally left. Not angrily. Not dramatically. It just didn't feel true to who I was, and I was tired of the inauthenticity.

Shortly after, I was in New York City for work. One evening I went looking for an ice cream shop and found something else entirely. Half a block ahead of me on a nearly empty sidewalk, a group of six or seven drag queens were walking toward me — loud, laughing, completely alive. A truck backed out of an alley and cut them off and they yelped and laughed even harder. I stopped walking. I just watched. For the first time in my life, I didn't feel the reflex to judge. I was just happy they were happy. Genuinely happy. Moved, even — because I saw human value and felt love in something I was unable to see or feel before.

Something cracked open in me on that sidewalk that hasn't closed since.

I still believe some things are wrong — hurting people is always wrong. But I've come to understand that most of us, across every background and belief, want the same things. Goodness. Safety. To be known and cared for. Loved. The barriers between us — language, culture, religion, lived experience — are real, but they're not the whole story.

Prayer cuts through them. It works from anyone, toward anyone. It is an act of goodwill that requires no shared doctrine. If there is a God, perhaps those prayers are heard and answered. If there isn't — can you imagine what the world would look like if we spent our energy genuinely wishing well for each other anyway?

That question is what became +Prayer.

Building +Prayer

I'm a software engineer at a company everyone knows. I've spent over a decade making ideas real in the digital world, and I wanted to build something with this skillset that connected people simply, positively, and for free — but also something refreshingly real and with a physical component like our prayer list.

My wife has been with me as a collaborator on this from the beginning — in how it works, what it stands for, and who it's for. Neither of us is religious in a traditional sense. We're more spiritual than anything. But we love people, and we believe kindness is its own kind of faith.

+Prayer is built to be incorruptible and unbiased — a space that belongs to whoever shows up with a genuine intention, regardless of what they believe or where they come from. We're not here to lead anyone's faith. We're here to hold space for it.

We're just getting started. We hope you'll be part of what this becomes.