Prayer

"And don't say anything you don't mean. This counsel is embedded deep in our traditions. You only make things worse when you lay down a smoke screen of pious talk, saying, 'I'll pray for you,' and never doing it, or saying, 'God be with you,' and not meaning it. You don't make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace. In making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true"

I have a buddy who went into the hospital about a year ago because something was going on with his heart. I was afraid for him, because on the way he was having trouble putting words together into a complete sentence. So, I grabbed a friend of mine and we went to meet him at the emergency room to see what was going on. 

As we stood there, and as I watched him lay there hooked up to all sorts of wires and IVs, I couldn't help but face the thought of, "Am I seeing my friend for the last time?"

And as our conversation unfolded, we started talking about prayer. And one of the things he told me was, "Don't tell anyone that I'm in the hospital. I don't want them to pray for me." His statement kind of caught me off guard because usually when someone's sick or suffering, they're eager to have people pray for them. But he explained what it meant, and it made perfect sense to me. 

He said he didn't want to hear people say, "I'm praying for you," because in his experience, every time he told people he'd pray for them, it was more about him sounding like he cared rather than actually caring. In essence, he was saying if people really wanted to care, they could come visit him in his lonely hospital room. Also, he told me that he was exactly where he was supposed to be in that moment - in the hospital with wires hooked up to him. He knew that if people prayed for him, they were gonna pray for a quick recovery, for the sickness to go away, and in his opinion, God had him right where God wanted him.

He gave me very specific instructions to only tell people about his condition if they were gonna visit him personally. And that was something I'd never thought about, as well as something that made me look at my own life and ask the question, "Am I using prayer as a cop-out to avoid taking action?"

This opens up two points about prayer that really interest me. 

The first is, how many times have I prayed in order to avoid having to get into action? Too many to count. In fact, because of my friend's statement there in that hospital, as well as what Jesus talked about above, and as well as some of the things written about prayer in the book Alcoholics Anonymous, I completely changed the way I pray. I don't pray for people to get well anymore. I don't pray for healing. I don't pray for me to get things.

My whole prayer life when it comes to praying for other people is wrapped up in a few words: "Your will be done." There's a passage somewhere in James that says something along the lines of, "If you neighbor is hungry, don't pray for him and walk away. Give him food." In other words, prayer is two-fold. If I'm going to pray for someone, I need to also be thinking of ways I can physically help the person out. Because many times, physically helping someone is the answer to any prayer I could offer up. And it means so much more to the person than telling them, "I'll be praying for you."

And the second point is this: the way I pray for other people is a reflection of how I view my own suffering. So, when I pray for people to get healed or get the right job or meet the right woman or find a quick exit to their illnesses, it's a reflection of my own inability to trust that God has me right where I'm supposed to be when I'm suffering. When I'm suffering or experiencing some kind of hardship, it takes way more courage and faith to pray "May your will be done," than to ask God to release me from my current state of being.

Prayer is really about relationships. It's about bringing the light of God into someone else's life and being a friend. It's about joining someone else in their suffering and letting them know that you're right there with them the whole way through. 

I have a friend who has a traumatic brain injury, and in the beginning, when no one knew for sure what was gonna happen, there were all sorts of "prayer warriors" who went to visit him in the hospital. There were priests with anointing oil, there were people who laid hands on him, and there were people who made sure to say they were praying for him. But the truth is, hardly any of those people ever came back. They came and went. But then, there were other people who have been visiting every week since he got in the car accident over three years ago. They've been developing a relationship with him, even though he's not cognitively aware sometimes that they're even there. 

Prayer is relationship. 

And one last note. Prayer is our way of connecting with God, however he understand God. But the best evidence we have of God is the way we connect with other people. And so, to connect with God through prayer, but to not also connect with other people is to miss out on half the beauty of prayer. To make myself part of the prayer by being active in the lives of those I pray for is to be a participator in my own prayers - to actually be a part of seeing the prayer come to life and turn into flesh and blood reality. 

I'd like wrap up with this question: Who or where are my prayers leading me to today?

Chances are, if I really think about it, I'm gonna find myself being a participator in God's ongoing restoration of creation, and I'm gonna get to see prayer fleshed out in ways I could've never dreamed of.