Dear Friends,

I was unable to send out a message last week because of internet problems now resolved.

On May 12, 1727, some Moravian believers in Herrenhut, Saxony, began a daily “watch” vigil for Christian revival. The Moravians kept it up for the next 100 years. The world’s first large scale missions effort was the result. John Wesley began to stir to a convicted faith through the witness of the Moravians while witnessing their calm during a storm while sailing to the Colony of Georgia.

Their revival came, but not all at once. As the believers prayed and stayed in prayer, God shaped them for service and many of them heard and claimed their own calling to go and spread the gospel. The intercessors were transformed by their prayers.

My matriarchal lineage traces back to these faithful believers. Ancestors came to Pennsylvania and North Carolina as missionaries in the 1740s and stayed on. Subsequent generations engaged in secular pursuits, but I have always found inspiration in that 100-year daily prayer vigil which bore much fruit for Christ from Lapland and Greenland to Africa and the Caribbean.

As I engage in intercessory prayer on a day by day basis for people struggling with serious health and business issues, the focus of prayer for me has become relationships, rather than expectations and results. Good relationships grow over time through daily communication.

Jesus spoke of prayer in terms of relationship – a loving parent and a child, neighbors at midnight, a widow convincing a judge to help her, friends, and so on. His own prayers were the supplications of a Son to his Father.

I lift up my friends and their needs to God the Father and God the Son. This requires me to focus on their needs, their concerns and difficulties with compassion. I seek the heart of God, and trust him for the answers.

God has a good heart. His intentions toward us are always love. I have come to know from experience the truth of David’s reason for praying to the Lord—
For You, O Lord, are good and forgiving,
abounding in steadfast love to all who call on you.
Give ear, O Lord, to my prayer;
listen to my prayer of supplication.
In the day of my trouble I call on you,
for you will answer me.
(Ps 86:5-7)

There are cancer diagnoses that seem hopeless. There are shadows of dementia that relentlessly lengthen. There is suffering without relief and losses irremediable this side of heaven.

When I pick up my friends in prayer, they are in distress, but where can I safely take them for help? I have neither clinical skills nor theological training. The arms of Jesus are the safest place I know to place them.

In the same manner, as I dropped my son off at school each morning, or I would take a friend to the emergency room, I carry my friends to the Lord in prayer and ask him to help them and to help me.

To pray like this is like gathering manna, the bread of heaven that the Lord sent to the children of Israel each day in the wilderness. The Lord provides us with sustenance for the day. He does not allow us to hoard supplies of the stuff, lest we turn away from dependence on him (Ex 16).

I listen with bemusement to the guarded reactions of administrators and pastors to the accounts of patients outliving their prognosis and being restored to life. “There are people who believe that praying to God has healed them – they have admirable faith,” said one leader recently in response to a woman being declared “cancer free” by her physicians after being told she only had four months to live with pancreatic cancer.

It is as if to credit God with a healing means turning one’s back on science and clinical skill. He is not an “either/or” God. He is all and in all. God is manifest in the prayers of the faithful and in the skills of the physicians, nurses and technicians.

Physicians may know that most people with the diagnosis of their patient die within months. But the physicians use their best efforts and the patient and the patient’s friends pray and encourage each other, the blessing of a day of life is experienced. To those suffering in the shadows of death, just making it through the day is a miracle. String enough days together and you have a future and a hope.

Here’s a definition of prayer that I really appreciate. “To pray is nothing more involved than to open the door, giving Jesus access to our needs and permitting Him to exercise His own power in dealing with them” (Ole Hallesby, Prayer [Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1994], p 3).

We don’t tell Jesus what to do. The day comes when we stop looking for a miracle and seek the peaceful joy of a loving relationship. That’s the point when the lines between our present and our eternity merge at the horizon for us. We stop insisting and expecting and begin thanking him for what we have.

We invite him to live with us and in us and to be present in the circumstances of our concern. He, who is Love personified, moves beyond being our yearned-for healer to become our healing and, beyond that, becomes our health as he embraces us and we cling to him in the intimacy of compassion and gratitude.

In a scene from the movie, “Shadowlands” C.S. Lewis has returned to Oxford from his bedside wedding to the terminally-ill, Joy Gresham. Lewis encounters his friend, Harry Harrington, an Episcopal priest who asks what news there is of Joy’s health.

Lewis buoyed by the wedding, says, “Ah, good news I think, Harry. Yes, good news.”

Harrington, not aware of the marriage, thinks that Lewis is referring to Joy’s medical condition. He replies, “I know how hard you have been praying . . . Now, God is answering your prayer.”

“That’s not why I pray, Harry,” Lewis responds. “I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I am helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God; it changes me.”

As someone who has learned my best lessons in prayer in suffering, loss and grief, that scene struck a deep and resonating chord within my soul when I saw it. I am still learning to pray for myself and for others, and God continues to change me and draw me closer. I love him for it.

“O taste and see that the Lord is good. Happy are those who take refuge in him” (Ps 34:8).

Under the mercy of Christ,

Kent

————————–