At the close of a visit with
friend who has spent more time in the hospital than either he or anyone anticipated,
I asked him what I could do for him. Without a moment’s hesitation, he said as
plainly as his physical condition would allow: “I want you to pray for me.”
He knew people had been
praying for him practically around the clock. But there is still comfort in
having someone take you by the hand---especially when circumstances of life
cascade over you till you feel like you are about to drown under the
pressure---and praying on your behalf.
He received my prayer as if
it were a precious gift---like a cup of cold water to a man who had gone days
without drinking.
Does prayer help? My friend
would answer with an emphatic, “Yes.” Christian novelist Ted Dekker said,
“Prayer may just be the most powerful tool mankind has.”
Some studies seem to indicate
that pray does have a powerful healing effect.
According to ABC News, one
such study, conducted at Mid-America Heart Institute in Kansas City, MO., divided
1,000 heart patients into two groups. One group was prayed for by a number of volunteers
as well as the hospital’s chaplain, and the other group was not. The patients
were not told they were being prayed for or that they were part of an
experiment. The experiment was conducted over the course of a year, during
which the patients’ health was scored according to pre-set rules by a third party
who did not know which patients had been prayed for and which had not. The
results: The patients who were prayed for had 11 percent fewer heart attacks,
strokes and life-threatening complications.
Dr. James O’Keefe, who reluctantly agreed to help fellow
cardiologist, Dr.William Harris, conduct the experiment said, "This study
offers an interesting insight into the possibility that maybe God is
influencing our lives on Earth," while admitting that as a scientist,
“it's very counterintuitive because I don't have a way to explain it."
Dr. Elizabeth Targ, a psychiatrist at the Pacific College of
Medicine in San Francisco, has also tested prayer on critically ill AIDS
patients. She has found that patients who received prayer had six times fewer hospitalizations
and that those hospitalizations were significantly shorter than those who were
not prayed for.
And Harold G. Koenig, M.D., director of Duke University’s Center for
Spirituality, Theology and Health, told Newsmax Health that “studies have shown
prayer can prevent people from getting sick — and when they do get sick, prayer
can help them get better faster.”
There
is much about this I don’t understand. Are my chances for healing better if I
join a large church so I can have more people praying for me in a time of need,
and if so, what about that poor soul who knows only a handful of people because
he lives alone in a remote town? Or is it the fervency and power of the prayers
and not necessarily the numbers of those praying? Or is it a combination?
I
do know God hears when we cry out to him, whether it’s your voice alone, “In my
distress I cried out to the Lord; yes, I prayed to my God for help. He heard me
from his sanctuary; my cry to him reached his ears” (Psalm 18:6), or the
prayers of many together: “They (the early disciples) all met together and were
constantly united in prayer…”(Acts 1:14).
When
it comes to how prayer works, I don’t have it all figured out. But that doesn’t
stop me from praying.
Prayer
works, even if I don’t see visible results in the person for whom I’m praying.
Prayer
works on me most of all. As Christian author Philip Yancey has said, “When I
pray for another person, I am praying for God to open my eyes so that I can see
that person as God does, and then enter into the stream of love that God
already directs toward that person.”
Holding the hand of my friend in the hospital, I sense the
yearning of a person desiring to know the love of God a little better and the
heart of a man determined to live so he can tell the story.
And I know that though he is in a hospital bed, it is well with
his soul.
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