Elder Wisdom by Keith
In these current times, matters of health and medical care are often close to mind. As we recall, Jesus’ ministry on Earth was largely a healing mystery (one example of many- John 5: 1-15), as people came to him presenting ailments they were powerless to treat or handle. Healing the body was always important to Jesus, as he also gently reminded His supplicants that the soul needed healing, too.
As citizens of modern America, we are in the top .1% of all humans that have ever lived, in terms of prosperity and security. You could say that one of the biggest challenges in modern American Christianity is adopting the sincere humility called for in our relationship with God. But, even in this blessed age, medical concerns will bring us to our knees, in humble, sincere prayer. As Covid-19 has reminded us (I know some didn’t need the reminder), modern medicine doesn’t have the answer for everything.
A prayer for healing, for ourselves or someone else, can be a very intimate prayer. I’ve heard it done two ways- either some version of “Lord, I pray that if it be your will, to heal” or the direct, “Lord, please heal”. It’s funny- we live in a world of medical science marvels like mRNA gene splicing and T-cell counts, but in an instant, we can be peers with all of our ancient brothers and sisters before us when facing a medical emergency.
(Side note- Once, entering the grocery store, I was engaged by a young man asking for change. He said, “You don’t know what it’s like to need to ask for help to get by.”
I replied, “On the contrary- when my newborn daughter was so sick in the hospital as an infant, I was on my knees begging for her life to the only One who could help.” We then talked about the importance of knowing what is really needed, so that the right help was requested.)
Which segues back to the topic of praying for healing. My understanding of the faith, of our faith, of my faith, is that our relationship with our Lord is not a transactional relationship. We worship God because He is worthy of praise. He bestows blessings to us out of His loving grace. There is no linkage between the two. There are no promises we can make or actions we can take here on Earth that will drive any predicted response from the Lord above.
Under such (lack of) terms, my preference in prayer is to ask for God to heal who I am praying for, with no equivocation of “…if it be your will”. I want to connect, so I pray honestly, without hedging, about my plea. He will intervene, or He will not, and as Job learned, it is not for us to claim any right to understand why. Also, as in Job, any speculation about the reasons for prayers’ answers is foolish. This is real and it is humbling, crushingly humbling, almost to despair. But Christ will not let us despair.
So, here we are. This- praying to our Heavenly Father for relief and healing in the face of a deadly disease- brings us in unity with all our brothers and sisters who came before us. Despite the wealth and knowledge of this modern age, we can still find ourselves as helpless and needy as the poor Christians of the early church. We Christians are a community that spans millenia, connected both by the strings of our baptisms, extending back, saint’s hand by saint’s hand, to Jesus Christ Himself, and by the shared experience of vital needs. When we go to the Lord in prayer, our intimate, humble lives become as grand as the heaven above.
