“The family that prays together stays together,” my girlfriend noted a few days ago, and it is true. We need the familiar so very much these days; we need to lean on and to be leaned upon; and when our mixed emotions threaten to weaken us and tear us apart, we need to pray.
We pray as Jesus taught us.
It is not our instinctive nature to know how to pray or what to say, but Jesus has made it easy, giving us words that say it all, every word with a power that we cannot find on our own. We pray, right from the start, to one who has been personally introduced to us not only as the Lord’s father but as Our Father, in the spirit of togetherness and family. God is our father and this is our prayer.
We pray with a sense of our place.
And we praise God, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name! But we also pray with the encouragement to turn boldly to Our Father with our every need. Jesus taught us to pray upward, without reserve and for everything at once: for strength and healing, providence and peace, hope and joy and humility. Yes, we talk of bread and leading and deliverance, but there is so much more than these words in the prayer we are taught.
We pray for strength.
We ask for the strength to merely stand sometimes, and once we are strong we pray for the strength to support others. And all along, weak or strong, we pray for the individual strengths of those around us. I am right now praying for Annie, our youngest sibling, who, being only twelve, has been hit especially hard this week. I am also praying for Mom and Don, who, being our parents, seem to be going through a period of rational denial —but who am I to say? I can only pray. And of course we all pray, every day, for Josh, who has the biggest battle to fight, and yet he seems so strong already, stronger than any one of us; often more fortified than all of us collectively. Still, we pray for his continued strength against all weakness, and we pray knowing that it is by the grace of God that Joshua is strong at all. All strength comes from God. Thine is the power.
We pray for healing.
“Deliver us from evil.” There are people in our church family who have started praying fervently for Joshua’s physical healing. Maybe he will be healed by these petitions. For the sake of Joshua and all of us, I hope that this will be true. We love Josh, we don’t want to lose him, but we sometimes fear the worst —Joshua dying, leaving us — and so we pray desperately for God to take away the cause of this fear. Some people even say that it is Satan inside of Joshua’s head, and these people pray quite intensely to exorcize. But I must tell you, I haven’t prayed this prayer very often. I don’t know why God put a tumor in Josh’s brain or why there is fear inside of my own head, but I don’t want to think about Satan. Nonetheless, or maybe consequently, I pray: Deliver us from fear and deliver Joshua from every malignancy. Deliver us from doubt and every shade of the devils within us. Deliver us from evil.
We pray for providence.
This is the healing prayer that I am more inclined to pray. I pray for the doctors. I pray for a reduction of any pain Joshua may have. I pray that he will be able to appreciate God’s gift of life to the fullest and I pray that it might be God’s will to let Joshua live rich and long. But I pray, perhaps more fervently again, for the strength of one step at a time, for Joshua and for all of us. I pray for a simple Providence, that God might simply provide us with what we need from day to day. Give us this day our daily bread.
We pray for peace.
We try to believe, somehow, that everything is according to God’s plan, that God is just and merciful, that whatever the cause of Joshua’s suffering, God will restore him and reward him in the end. The very last of us, the least comforted, will be the first: God has promised this. I don’t know how to rest in this promise, but I am praying all the same for the truth of it, that Thy will be done and that I will be able to accept the pace of it even before I know the peace of it. We don’t pray to understand. We pray instead for God’s strengthening through the trials and for God’s encouragement by his presence and loudest of all for what we don’t have: that specific peace, the peace that passes all understanding: peace for Joshua, peace for each one of us brought together in prayer, peace on earth as it is in heaven.
We pray for hope.
We pray to believe that some day, if we all keep praying, we will reach the place where there are no weaknesses or fears or pain or confusion, where there is only the certainty that God’s will is to take care of us —forever and ever. “The kingdom of God is very near,” always, and so it is: Thine is the kingdom, and so we pray, Thy kingdom come!
We pray for joy.
And that we will one day be able to look back and see all that God has given us —even a brain tumor, even if it is a cancerous one —as a blessing. “Blessed be the name of Yahweh!” cried Job in a windstorm. Hallowed be thy name, he cried. And I pray to have that same perception, that beautiful attitude, well before the final day, even as God’s will is done here on earth, as it will be done in heaven. “Blessed be the name of Yahweh!” I want to say, even in the midst of this misfortune, blessed be God for all things! Thine is the glory.
That is how I would pray all the time. But I admit, I cry more often out of fear and uncertainty and anxiety, and so there is one more thing I am learning to pray these days. I pray for forgiveness. I pray to be forgiven for my lack of joy and my weakening faith, even as I learn to forgive others for their own lacking —the deniers, the perplexed ones, the people who refuse to see Satan and the people who see more of Satan and less of God. I pray to remember that underneath our mixed emotions and amidst the storms around us we are all the same; lead us not into the temptation of thinking otherwise.
Forgive us all, Father, and help us to have faith the size of a mustard seed to move each mountain before us. Or if it is thy will, Father in heaven, give us the strength to climb the mountain and to get to the other side.
At 520 Stewart we have prayed many prayers in the last several days, but each of our prayers are in the nature of the singular prayer that Jesus taught us to pray, the Lord’s prayer that is our prayer. In Jesus’s name we pray.
Thank you God for teaching us to pray and for hearing our prayers, for giving us your strength, your healing, your providence, your peace, your hope, your joy, and for giving us forgiveness and a place for us beyond our mixed emotions.
Forever and ever, Amen. Let it be so.
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