The power of others’ prayers

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.

Loving-kindness

The bumper sticker had only one word on it: “Loving-kindness.”

And as soon as I read it, I suspected Someone was trying to mess with my mind, for I was in no mood for such a one word aphorism as “loving-kindness,” my patience having been tested by the distracted waitress who forgot to turn in half of my lunch order.

We were traveling back from a restful trip to South Carolina, and the more I drove, the more I traded my new relaxed attitude for my old familiar drivenness, determined to reach my destination by nightfall. And vacation traffic was slowing me down.

I was passing a plain, white, mid-size, economy car, when I saw the bumper sticker: “Loving-kindness.”

The driver, in the car alone, resembled Clarence, the lovable angel in the classic movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, only this man looked a bit older and more weathered than the softer Clarence.

Lori didn’t notice my agitation because she was sleeping, pleasantly unperturbed by the traffic in front of us, or the memory of the waitress behind us---who was at least partially to blame for my agitation, or so I reasoned.

Then I saw the bumper sticker again, maybe thirty or forty miles after the first sighting.

“Strange,” I mused, “how did Clarence II get in front of me?”

By then Lori had awakened. After a few minutes, or maybe seconds, of observing my driving, she advised, “Remember, the main thing is that we get there safe and sound.”

“Yes, yes, I know,” I grumbled.

About 30 minutes later it happened again; I passed Clarence II a third time.

“Am I in the Twilight Zone or what?” I said, pointing to the “Loving-kindness” bumper sticker on Clarence II’s plain, white, mid-sized, economy car, explaining how I had already passed him twice before.

“How does this guy keep getting in front of me?” I asked, momentarily taking both hands off the wheel to emphasize the gravity of my question.

I didn’t so much as crack a smile when Lori giggled.

Thirty minutes later we stopped for a quick break and a cup of coffee.

As the young employee, an older teen probably getting some summer work experience, handed me the change, Lori innocently asked her, “How much is your ‘senior coffee’?”

Then the fun began.

“Oops,” the novice worker replied, “I guess I overcharged you. I’ll get the manager to override the cash register.”

Before I could say, “No, no, don’t worry, we need to get back on the road,” the teen had turned the other way to get the manager.

The manager, looking to be all of 25 years old, openly expressed her frustration with the younger employee, even though Lori apologized for having asked the price of the coffee in the first place.  And the stubborn cash register wasn’t cooperating with the manager, either. All the while, Lori repeated how sorry she was, even as I was tapping my foot, arms folded across my chest, anxious for this little delay to be resolved.

Then the manager said something she shouldn’t have. Murmuring loud enough for me to hear, she complained, “It only amounts to 25 cents a cup.”

Suddenly all the irritating comments of employees I had encountered in my last few weeks of travel were localized in this one, fast food manger. I heard the words from the airline stewardess who bluntly told me, “You can’t keep your laptop there,” instead of a more professional, “Please put your laptop under your seat.” (“Who trains these people, anyway?” I whispered to Lori)

Then there was the stewardess who sounded like Ned in the First Reader as she stammered through the pre-flight passenger instructions, even forgetting our destination, “Louisville, KY.”(I turned to Lori: “If she can barely read and doesn’t know where we’re going, should we trust her to take care of us 30,000 feet in the air?”)

And another stewardess gave us the time from the wrong time zone once we had landed. (“They don’t know where we are or the time. Thank the Lord we made it.”)

And finally, there was the not so amusing waitress who chuckled about how she had forgotten to turn in my lunch order.

I aimed my salvo of vituperation in the direction of the fast food manager: “Excuse me?” I was preparing to ask, “Did you just say, ‘It only amounts to 25 cents a cup?’ So, if I were SHORT 25 cents for my coffee, would you tell me, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it, just get kinda close, that’ll be good enough?’”

I planned to clinch with an emphatic, “I don’t THINK so.”

Of course, I was going to threaten her by recording her name, which I would fire off in my blistering report to headquarters.

And then, I saw him, out of the corner of my eye.

Clarence II was standing right there, not 10 feet away from me, nonchalantly eating vanilla ice cream, oblivious to my presence.

“Okay, I really am in the Twilight Zone,” I thought.

Or something worse.

Or better.

Clarence’s bumper sticker, “Loving-kindness,” was blazoned before my eyes like a flashing neon sign.

Calmly turning back to the manager, I said, “We are so sorry for the inconvenience. Thanks for your help.”

And to the younger worker, “You’re fine; it happens to all of us.”

As for my speech, it had evaporated into the air before I uttered a word of it, absorbed by the bumper sticker, “Loving-kindness,”on the back of the plain, white, mid-sized, economy car.

Driven by Clarence II.

Whom I never saw again.

Daddy's gone

“You always miss your daddy when he’s gone. My daddy’s been gone 25 years now, and I miss him every day.”

That’s my 91-year-old dad consoling my wife, Lori, just the other day when we were visiting him in Lubbock, TX. Her dad died recently, and the pain left by his demise is still raw.

As Dad spoke, I flashbacked to that day several weeks ago when I was rushing Lori to the airport so she could see her dad once more before he died. “My daddy’s dying,” she said, tears welling up in her eyes, enunciating her words matter of factly, like a person who awakens in the morning to find the lights were left on all night, acknowledging the obvious with surprise, “The lights are on.”

“My daddy’s dying.”

And that night, a few hours after her arrival, he was gone.

Father’s Day is a day to celebrate dads, but for many, the joy is tinged with the pain of a daddy that’s gone.

“It’s hard to say goodbye to your dad, especially when you’ve had a good one,” Lori whispered to herself as much as to me as I kissed her good-bye just before she stepped into the security line at the airport.

“What do you miss most about granddad?” I questioned Dad after he tried to comfort Lori.

His eyes moistened and his voice cracked: “I just didn’t let him know how much I appreciated him for the sacrifices he made.”

Dad gave a for instance:  His dad (my granddad) sent Mom and Dad $50 a month the entire time Dad was in dental school.

I didn’t take Dad’s remorse to mean he had had a failure of etiquette; it wasn’t that Dad had forgotten to send thank you notes or neglected to verbalize his appreciation. No, I believe it went deeper than that.

I believe Dad wished he had gazed deeply into his daddy’s life more often, taking in their lives together in ways neither Dad nor Granddad would allow at the time. Life got intense. Dad worked his way through dental school, set up a new dental practice, labored diligently to be successful, providing for his growing family’s needs. And Granddad lived a full life too.

What likely happened is what happens to many a father and son: I think my dad shook his dad’s hand, maybe at graduation, then waved good-bye as Dad raced to fulfill his role as a dentist with new patients and a father with responsibilities. Now at 91, he’s thinking back more and more to what really matters. And what really matters is the legacy of love we leave those who come behind us. Dad sees how his dad did that, and Dad wishes he had returned the love more often, sharing more meaningful moments with his dad.

For me, knowing my dad’s time won’t go on forever (and the thought of losing your dad, especially when you’ve had a good one, is painful, so we tend to dismiss it) makes me realize that I feel the same way about him as he does his dad, my granddad.

It’s easy to think about the times when we missed it rather than celebrate the moments when we had it.

A man reflected on his relationship with his father. As a child he looked up to his dad as the kind of man who put life’s disasters into perspective, whether it was a broken leg or a broken heart. As an adult, this man went through a series of personal crises that left him devastated. Feeling overwhelmed and helpless, he spent his last $300 on a trip to visit his father in Florida. 

On the last night of his stay, with his personal problems still unresolved and awaiting him, he and his dad stood at the end of a jetty, watching the sun setting into the Gulf of Mexico. In frustration, he turned to his dad and blurted, “You know Dad, if we could take all of the great moments we’ve experienced together in our lifetimes and put them back to back, they wouldn’t last 20 minutes.”

His dad responded with a simple, “Yup.”

It stunned the son. He looked back at the red glow of the sun disappearing on the horizon.

And then the father turned to him, and looking squarely into his son’s eyes, said, “Precious, aren’t they?”

All we can do is take in those daddy moments, precious as each one is, and embrace them, and once those moments have passed into eternity, continue to live them, for they carry within them the legacy daddy left--- and as long as we live the legacy of love in the best way we can---even though daddy’s gone, he’s still here.

What’s your excuse?

George Washington Carver, the botanist and inventor---who as a black man in the Reconstruction era of nineteenth century America had reason upon reason for not succeeding---once observed, “Ninety-nine percent of failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.”

Carver made a conscious decision not to allow his disadvantages keep him from making positive contributions to life.

I admit, I have to stand guard over myself lest I fall into the excuse-making syndrome. Last week I had some time with my oldest daughter, Mary, while waiting at the airport for her brother to arrive. I was sharing with her some of the things I “needed” to do in a certain area of my life but hadn’t done yet. “Dad, you’ve been talking about that forever,” she said. “You just need to take the advice you’ve given us (her brothers and sister) all these years, set your goals, make plans to achieve them, and then just do it.”

Sometimes we need reminders because it’s easy to drift into a morass of mediocrity in certain areas of our lives.

Mary’s conversation reminded me of something my wife told me me several years ago. “You’ve been talking about writing a book since we’ve been married. I’m going to stay after you until you do it, and I’m not to let up.” (I like living, and her “publish or perish” mandate scared me so much that I published three books, and just to stay on her good side, I’m working on a fourth.)

While I wasn’t as creative in my excuse making as W.C. Fields, who advised, “Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of snakebite, and furthermore always carry a small snake,” I found that the generalization, “I’ve got so much to do, I don’t have time,” worked just as well.

Recently, Harriet Thompson of Charlotte, NC, became at age 92, the oldest woman to finish a marathon. I looked her up. Thompson has acres of room for excuses not to run, beginning with her age, a 92-year-old woman running 26.2 miles. It took her 7 hours, 7 minutes, and 42 seconds to do it, but by golly she did it. 

She had other reasons not to show up for the race: She is a two-time cancer survivor.

But there’s more: She missed out on training in late 2014 and early 2015 because her husband of 67 years died in January after battling cancer.

That’s not all: While training for this race, she contracted a staph infection in her legs. (She wore white tights under her running shorts to cover open wounds on her legs and had only recently stopped taking morphine and hydrocodone to manage the pain.)

One of the keys to overcoming the excuse-making habit is to have reasons for accomplishing the goal that are stronger than the excuses. Not only has Thompson fought cancer herself, but she also has several friends and family who have battled blood cancers. Since 1999, she has raised about $100,000 for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. On May 31, 2015, the day she set the record as the oldest woman to finish a marathon, she raised $8,000.

“I never try to compete,” she told race organizers. “I just try and make money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.”

So, what’s keeping you from achieving that goal you’ve had on your mind all these years? Start now. Time is on your side if you will only take the first step in the direction of your dream.

Coach Lou Holtz tells about a man who had been thinking about taking up the saxophone. All his life he had yearned to play in a jazz band. But just as he was about to purchase the instrument and take lessons, he balked. When his wife asked him why, he replied, “I’m forty-five. I just realized it will take five years of intense practice before I’m ready to play in public. I’ll be fifty by then.”

You’ve got to love the response his wife gave him: “And how old will you be in five years if you don’t study the saxophone?”

He got the message, bought the sax, and within four years was gigging every weekend in local jazz clubs.

I get the message, too.

And I’m sure you do as well.

Hurry up and wait

I was praying something like this: “Lord, I’m afraid I’m going to be late, and you know, Lord, it’s embarrassing for the preacher to be late for a wedding rehearsal, especially when the preacher’s son is the best man, and he’s waiting on his dad to get there, so Lord, have mercy, and as I drive faster than is legally permissible, would you kindly remove these pesky, slow drivers from my path, and please, please, PLEASE have mercy and don’t let me get stopped by the law, for you know, Lord, I do not have the time or money for a speeding ticket.”

It’s a lame prayer, I admit, certainly not one I’m particularly proud of or likely to submit to “An Anthology of the World’s Most Meaningful Prayers.”

But I was desperate.

Having been gone five days in Oklahoma, where I had presided at the funeral for my father-in-law, I was physically and emotionally drained by the time I arrived back home late the night before I was to be in northern Kentucky the next day for a wedding rehearsal.

Somehow, the day of the rehearsal had gotten away from me. My “to-do” list was shot to pieces before noon. I had too little time for too many chores, and so I had a late start getting on the road.  About a third of the way to the venue for the wedding, with Friday afternoon traffic clogging the two lane, often farm to market roads I was traveling, I realized I was in trouble.

That was when I asked the good Lord to remove all obstacles and just get me to the church, get me to the church on time.

Some days slip away from us.  The unexpected happens, you try to stay on course, but then another curve surprises you, distracting you even more. You do things like forget where you placed your car keys, or wallet, or cell phone. Then you look at the clock, and oh my goodness, you’re an hour behind.

That feeling of being overwhelmed causes your stress level to mount. Your heart rate increases, your breathing quickens, and your muscles tighten.  If allowed to continue for prolonged periods of time, stress can have devastating effects on your health, even if you pray that God will allow you to be an exception to the laws of physiology or the highway.

I was weaving in and out of traffic like Mario Andretti.

Then everything changed, in an instant.

It occurred somewhere in Henry County, Kentucky.

I passed one car, thought I had a stretch of open road to accelerate even more when I careened around a curve and saw a long, flat bed truck hauling hay, one more irksome obstacle on my racetrack to the finish line. I groaned and peered around the truck, looking for a break in the traffic.  

Just before putting on my left turn signal to pass the slow moving albatross in front of me, I saw her.

She was a Hispanic lady, probably in her mid 20s, sitting on top of the hay in the bed of the truck, up close to the cab, her arms crossed, resting on her chest, a couple of friends or co-workers to her side. She was facing me, staring right at me. She cocked her head to the side, like she was curious about something, and then she threw a carefree, siesta smile right in my direction, as if she were saying, “Why are you so intense, sir? Why the grimace on your face? Why that furrowed brow? You look so funny, caught up in whatever it is that’s causing you to rush like a maniac.”

Before I could process it, I had zoomed around the truck.

And then I realized what I had just seen.

Suddenly, I started laughing at my prayer, my dilemma, my crazy driving, my inflated perception of my role in a wedding rehearsal.

Then I stepped off the accelerator, rolled down my car window, breathed in the country fresh air, and shouted, “Take in this moment.”

And it was a beautiful moment.

I noticed the dark, rich soil where tender, young tobacco plants waved at me from the rolling hills that stretched into the clear blue sky above.  And every little town I passed through seemed to invite me to stop and stay awhile, or at least promise to come back and snooze on one of its benches along the town square and let the birds serenade me with their afternoon love songs.

I wanted to turn around, drive back to the flat bed truck and thank the smiling lady.

But I didn’t.

Instead, I took my time, drinking in all that the road offered me, arriving at the rehearsal with plenty of time to spare.

Humorist Will Rogers once observed, “Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life to save.”

“You’re good, Dad, no one around here is in much of a hurry,” Dave said as he hugged me.

“That’s good, Dave, because neither am I,” I responded.

“Not anymore.”