I can't believe I haven't posted anything on here for my poor followers since August, I'm not very good at this blogging/consistency thing. However, this being an excellent semi-useful means of procrastination, today is the day to remedy this! (It's ok, I'm pondering my other assignment in the back of my mind also, don't worry)
As part of the final non-fiction section of my course last yr, I was asked to write an essay, and not really given any more restrictions than minimum 1000 words. Turns out I managed to wow my teacher (finally, thank goodness) and got an A, but would be interested to know what you think of the following. These are my thoughts on prayer and healing.
Healing
By Lauren Brooking
Countless books have been filled with prayers, musings about prayers, and ravings about the varying effectiveness of said prayers. I have no intention to attempt to address the infinite realms of possibilities for tangents from this topic. One such tangent to be addressed is the difference between prayer, luck, coincidence, and positive thinking. I’m not entirely convinced there is a definitive one, but we won't go into that for now. I could spend a lifetime arguing if prayer ‘works’ or not. I merely seek to share some of my experiences with this strange phenomenon.
One definition of prayer is “supplication, the act of communicating with a deity, especially as a petition, in adoration, contrition, thanksgiving” (Wordnet, 2011). My definition would be seeking to gain a sense of control or peace in circumstances that leave you with anything but – occasionally with some thanks or praise thrown in there too.
A pastor once told me that there are three basic answers to prayer: go, slow and no. Basically, the options are ‘yes’, ‘no’ or the illusive ‘maybe’. It is not often that Christians talk openly about instances where prayers were answered with a ‘no’, or where it seems like they flat out weren’t answered.
The first prayer I remember having answered was when I was about four years old – the neighbours were having a bonfire in their backyard and my mum had washing out on the line, and was complaining that it would now smell like smoke. I prayed that the smoke would move. After a quick stint on my knees, I went to check and the wind had changed direction – the smoke was now blowing the opposite way.
My experience with prayer has usually been a peace-bringing, faith-affirming, yes-answering experience, until 2010.
My brother Peter had been crippled by chronic depression since age 15. He only had blips of improvements and they were short-lived at best. He was on my mind a lot when I was living in Laos, particularly when his girlfriend started emailing me with more details. I struggled long and hard with the decision of staying or going, and one morning I was so sick of the indecision, I yelled at God “I need to know what you want me to do!” I then flipped my bible open to a random page and my eyes landed on the only red letters on the page: “No, go back to your family, and tell them everything God has done for you.” (Luke 8:39, NLT, 2011)
So home I went. (After a Jonah impression in Sydney for three months.)
Home was a mess, so I set about fixing it. I was 'God’s gift' to my family and they needed my help, clearly. Nine tumultuous months later, Peter’s unhinged girlfriend had moved out, Dad had moved overseas, it was just my brothers, Peter, Steven and I left - oh, and the squatter, Roch. I had a new sales job lined up, so I could escape from the tedium of Dominos and life was finally looking up.
I had been praying for Peter for years, as had my mum and many others. Yet never in all this time had I dared to let myself really hope, until one weekend. My best friend, Georgina, and I went to a conference in Auckland with our church pastor, Mel, on May 7-9, 2010. The conference was about prayer and healing for believers. I spent the weekend praying and weeping for the brokenness of my family, in particular Peter and my dad. After that weekend, I had the first glimmer of hope that my prayers would be answered. Then the morning I got back, I broke the fifth metatarsal in my left foot.
I got home alright, but I couldn’t go to work that night because I couldn’t get my foot in a shoe. I hobbled to Peter’s room and he begrudgingly drove me to the hospital after I bribed him with pizza. Depressed Peter was not the kind of person who would go out of his way to do anything, let alone something he didn’t actually want to do, and selfless altruism? No way.
This same Peter did a surprising impression of a ‘nice guy’ during my 3 week incapacitation – he drove me places and did housework and got me food and other things when I needed them. We watched movies and he taught me mind-boggling things about science. I helped him map out his study plans to move to Invercargill to study sound engineering. Those weeks were probably the most time I’d spent with Peter since we used to play dress ups together.
Peter also started coming out of his room more. To my delight, I came home one day to find he’d even cleaned the kitchen. The next week he asked mum how to boil eggs so he could make awesome sandwiches. This was a new, previously unseen side of Peter that hadn’t even existed prior to depression. Perhaps this was the answer to prayer I’d been hoping for?
The squatter had been kicked out on May 31. I started work back at Studylink on June 1, hobbling in on crutches. Peter had faithfully dropped me off and picked me up. June 2, after Peter had picked me up, we’d talked about going to the movies, but there was nothing good on. He smiled as we talked, and I smiled back: progress. But in the early hours of June 3, he took his life.
The next day as we drove around Wellington, I didn’t really intentionally pray, it just came out as ‘But why, God? This is not what I wanted, this isn’t what I prayed for, I asked for healing!’ I heard this voice in my head say ‘Sometimes death is healing’. I was genuinely okay with that for about a month – watching Peter attempt to live was agonizing – and then I started thinking about it a bit more. And more. And more.
After months of seething rage towards God, the world, depression, and Peter himself, everything came to a head at Parachute Music festival in Jan 2011. All the bands I saw mentioned losing hope, suicide, depression, holding on, or something to that effect and by Saturday night, I couldn’t take it anymore. A meltdown of gargantuan proportions followed. I found a quiet place and wrote a list of questions entitled ‘My Beef with God’.
The first question was ‘If God is all powerful, then why wouldn’t he stop suicide?’ As soon as I wrote the question, this same voice that had spoken earlier came back with an answer, ‘Free choice. Love isn’t love without the ability for it to be something else as well.’
The questions poured out like a broken dam, and an answer matched each, as fast as I could write. ‘I thought you’d heal Peter, it feels like you’ve betrayed me’ was met with ‘Do you think I wanted this to happen any more than you did? It wasn’t my will for Peter’s life. Your prayer was heard, and I tried.’
Next was ‘How can I look at you in all your glory and love and reconcile that with a God who allows free choice to the point of suicide?’ This was rebutted with ‘You need love, not reasons at the moment. The answers to the whys would be so grossly insufficient for the magnitude of your questions anyway.’
Towards the end I incredulously asked ‘How can you possibly use this for my good?’ referencing Romans 8:28 “In all things God works for the good of those who love him” (NIV, 2011). God replied ‘Though everything is terrible now, it will get better. And good will eventually come from this. Eventually. Guard your hope.’
Will ‘good’ ever come from this? Is death really healing? Were my prayers answered? I have no idea. I realised many months after, that had I not broken my foot, I would never have spent so much time with Peter in the few weeks before he died. But moments over a broken foot don’t compensate for months of a broken life. A cynic might say that I used religion as a crutch to get through a dark time in my life. A cynic might be right. But I used crutches when I broke my foot – if I hadn’t, I might still be hobbling.
References
New Living Translation. (1996). Luke, The Bible, http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+8%3A39&version=NLT, (retrieved 24/10/2011)
New International Version. (1978). Romans, The Bible, http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+8%3A28&version=NIV (retrieved 27/10/2011)
Prayer. (2005) In WordNet, http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=prayer, (retrieved 27/10/2011.)
