For the past several months, I have wrestled with my prayer list of names of folks who need physical healing. I believe in the power of prayer because scripture – and experience – testifies to the truth of that power, but my list right now weighs on my heart in a profound, uneasy way. 

I’ve prayed enough years to understand there will routinely be seasons when sickness features prominently in my petitions to God. But this particular season of prominent sickness has a uniquely heavy quality to it. I have found myself struggling to make sense of God’s goodness and mercy in the face of what can look like a body of evidence of God’s indifference to suffering.

Given the number of times in the past when I have prayed to God for people’s healing, what makes right now so hard?

Three things about right now…

First and most obviously, there is the general malaise of pandemic-trauma. The entire world is staggering under the burden of protracted suffering from an illness that terrifies not just because it can be so lethal but also because it is novel and therefore not thoroughly understood. Fear of “the unknown” always manifests in twisted ways; everything from racism to anti-Semitism to generic xenophobia has that twisted fear at the core. But the same old fear is newly powerful and pernicious because it is so widespread. I’d argue that the spiritual pandemic of fear is at least as powerful as the physical pandemic of coronavirus – and the divisiveness, irrational hostility, and vilification of “the other” that always accompanies fear of the unknown is on truly overwhelming display. So, praying for victims of Covid 19 leads to praying for victims of fear – and the number of the latter exceeds the number of the former by a huge factor.

Second (and almost as obvious), there are the people loved by me who are battling physical ravages of the coronavirus. A cherished sister – nine months into a crucible of crushing fatigue, relentless oxygen deprivation, and overwhelming frustration at her own limitations – is facing a doctor-ordered month off from a pastoring job she loves. The doctor who has ordered the rest cure has no idea if it will be effective, but it’s the only trick he hasn’t yet tried. In similar straits, a Sunday School brother who was a front-line-hero just a year ago – serving in hospitals in New York City when, as he summarizes, “pretty much everyone was dying” – sits at home these days, imprisoned in a body so wrecked by the after-effects of the virus that he can’t work. The paradox is cruel: his expertise on treating patients with Covid is being withheld from others because of his own battle with Covid. As the sole breadwinner for his family, the stress of the situation makes “rest” almost impossible. So, praying for Samantha and Stephen leads to praying for the many people who are suffering because these two are suffering: her congregation, his patients, both their spouses. 

The other category that dominates my prayers for healing these days is, for me, the hardest of all to trust to God: children. Children are all but exempt from the physical ravages of the pandemic, but suddenly I am surrounded by children who are seriously ill with other things. A brave 12-year-old battling Crohn’s disease. A courageous 9-year-old facing Guillain-Barre. Two other girls in that age range incapacitated by chronic pain – one dependent on a walker. A fifth girl – an older teenager – in hospital fighting off a bone marrow infection. All of these girls known and loved by me and mine… not statistics, not abstractions, but precious girls with distinct personalities and histories and families. Their families! Moms and dads and grandparents worn so thin by the strain that you can see it in their eyes and their posture. Siblings struggling to balance altruistic concern with childish (appropriate) jealousy and resentment. Praying for these girls leads to praying for – and weeping with – their families. Every time.

The truth about Too Much

Acknowledging the impossibility of making sense of any of this – much less all of this – has to precede anything else. 

The “too-muchness” of human suffering is a fact acknowledged in scripture and underscored in every generation by thinkers of all philosophical and theological stripes. 

But where we go after that first step of naming the “too muchness” matters a great deal. 

The biblical character of Job models for us that next step: straight to the Lord, allowing our pain and confusion full vent:

“Do not human beings have a hard service on earth,
    and are not their days like the days of a laborer?
² Like a slave who longs for the shadow,
    and like laborers who look for their wages,
³ so I am allotted months of emptiness,
    and nights of misery are apportioned to me.
⁴ When I lie down I say, ‘When shall I rise?’
    But the night is long,
    and I am full of tossing until dawn.”

(Job 7:1 – 4)

Honesty, grief, and hope

God is not offended by our honesty. Indeed, the One who calls Himself “the Way, the Truth, and the Life” insists that we bring Him only that which is honest. 

Jesus spelled out the facts of facing “too muchness” early in His ministry: “Blessed are those who mourn,” he said in Matthew 5:4, “for they will be comforted.” Naming the grief – owning the pain – that is the prerequisite for any comfort, any healing God has in mind for us.

Once we’ve gotten honest with God, the next step is to allow God to get honest with us. Scripture tells it to us straight: this world is fallen. This world is sin-sick. Pain and suffering are part and parcel of living on earth. But – this world is beloved, too. And there is a Healer for every sin-sickness – available to us, 24/7. And the pain and suffering intrinsic to life on earth are not exempt from the guarantee that that Healer can and will use them for redemptive purpose:

“We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.”

(Romans 8:28)

The Parable of the Unjust Judge

One of my favorite teachings of Jesus when I was a baby Christian was the Parable of the Unjust Judge. Here it is:

Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. ² He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. ³ In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my opponent.’ ⁴ For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, ⁵ yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’” ⁶ And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. ⁷ And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? ⁸ I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

(Luke 18:1 – 8)

At the time, I thought this story credited the tenacity of the widow for her eventual triumph over her opponent. That appealed to my competitive nature and my deep longing to believe I was in control. I was already stubborn and argumentative – here was a story that proved those qualities were gifts from God! Ahem.

Over the years, I have begun to understand that this story is actually an invitation to surrender all illusions of control – to put all energies into depending on God. The figure of the widow is completely helpless… she hasn’t got a chance of prevailing within a system in which she holds no cards whatsoever. Without a husband or a son to advocate on her behalf, she is an adult orphan. Helpless. Hopeless.

Jesus’s introductory explanation (all but invisible to me, back in the day) sums up the point of the story: we are called to pray always and to never lose heart. That is only logical when we let go of our illusions of self-determination, and only possible when we make God (not our selves or our circumstances) the exclusive focus of our prayers. 

Notice with me that the widow in the parable ignores her actual opponent so she can concentrate wholly on the judge who has authority over her case. In the same way, Christian prayer is a choice to lay out the truth of our circumstances and selves, and then ignore them as we concentrate wholly on the Lord who has authority over our cases. 

Focus = Faith

This present heaviness of heart I am dragging around says more about my mis-focus than it does about the dilemmas of the people for whom I am praying. Their suffering is too much of a burden for me to bear! But God never intended me – or them – to bear it. 

What is hard to accept and impossible to see unless I am focused on God alone: in acute suffering, humanity becomes uniquely positioned to experience intimacy with God… and the “too muchness” of this life can be a direct portal to glimpses of the glories of the life that is coming.

Paul, a man who suffered and saw suffering beyond anything I am ever likely to endure or to see, had this to say:

^“But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. ⁸ We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; ⁹ persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; ¹⁰ always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. ¹¹ For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh.” 

(2 Corinthians 4:7 – 11)

The point is NOT the suffering… the point is the Lord who empowers us to endure the suffering and guarantees that the suffering will subside forever, someday. 

Endurance in Christ

I will be praying for those suffering with Covid 19 for a while yet. I will be praying for Samantha and for Stephen. I will be praying for those precious, suffering girls. But if I want to be able to persist in prayer that is powered by surrender – like the widow’s in the parable – then I must be prepared for the long haul. I must fix my eyes on Jesus rather than on their pain. And I must put them (and myself) under God’s authority. 

There will routinely be seasons when sickness features prominently in my petitions to God. But the seasonless, eternal truth is that God hears my petitions and holds all healing in His compassionate hands. His steadfast love endures forever – His mercies are new every morning – and He will, one day, wipe every tear from our eyes as we walk into eternity with Him in bodies that will never, ever be sick again.