The Rest of the Old, Old Story

This is another old story, but it addresses well the fact that there are some people God listens to more than he does others. In case you didn’t know that, it’s true. In fact, it’s very true.

As a very young Christian, 26 years ago, I went to my boss, Roger, who was mainly responsible for my conversion, and I told him about one of my best friends. He was an alcoholic with a very regular habit. He drank 12 beers every day except Saturday and Sunday, when he drank a whole case. He did this every day and every week like clockwork.

Roger prayed. He prayed one of those charismatic-type prayers about binding “that demon of alcohol.” Personally, after 26 years, I don’t think those prayers are any more or less effective than more traditional prayers. I don’t think God tends to be impressed with our words or methods. I think he’s impressed by faith.

Anyway, that was a Friday. I didn’t see my friend that night because I spent most Friday evenings praying and worshipping with my new friends. As I said, I was a new Christian at the time.

Saturday, however, I did see Beav. The first thing he said to me was, “The most amazing thing happened last night.” He then told me how he hadn’t wanted to drink the whole night. He hadn’t had a single beer.

Now the flip side of that is that it was Saturday morning and he was already drinking. I went off by myself later and tried to “bind that demon of alcohol” like Roger did, and it didn’t work. God simply had a lot more regard for Roger’s prayers than for mine. I’ve had to learn why over the years, and my prayers are much more effective now than they were then. Mostly, I have more faith, and I’m a lot more likely to wait for God to show me what to pray for. As the Scriptures say, “We do not know how to pray as we ought.” Prayer requires God’s help.

Here’s another one that got emailed to me. I have some comments at the end about what I like about this one.

About ten years ago, while still living at home shortly after graduating from my undergraduate studies. My mother, a very nominal Jew, subscribed to a magazine that was celebrating Abraham Joshual Heschel. I wasn’t a believer of any stripe then. I remember feeling very lost during that time, weighed down by the poor and selfish decisions I’d been in the habit of making for a long time. I was searching, but had no real faith in anything to speak of.

I don’t remember much about the text Heschel wrote except that he testified that the world really did testify to a Maker. I remember that point making a very real impression on me. I remember thinking on this throughout the day. Well, after work I remember walking down the street and realizing that I could not account for “creation” by man’s efforts alone. It was at that moment when I realized I was a believer–not in Christ, but in a Creator, generally speaking. Then, I had a nagging desire to know this Creator, and remember thinking I didn’t care who it turned out to be, or in which religion I found Him–Buddhism, Islam, Jesus. It just didn’t matter.

I remember thinking, “I really want to know this God. And, I’d really love to have someone who could teach me about it. It was minutes, maybe seconds, from that moment, when a guy walked up to me and asked me if he could ask me a question. I said sure, and he asked me about my “relationship with God.” It took about another 6 to 8 months before I came to the place when I could give my life to Jesus. But, I always remember that thought/prayer which expressed my own desire to know the Creator, and how quickly (within moments/seconds) He answered. That experience has been very helpful in the many moments since when I’ve found myself feeling faithless.

I don’t believe prayer is a one-way street. Prayer comes in many forms, but quite often it is prompted by God. First God speaks, then we ask, and then we see the answer. In this case, God was obviously sending the answer long before the prayer was prayed. Prayer was just part of what God was doing. It was not what initiated God’s actions.

Sometimes God’s actions are initiated by a person or people crying out to him, but just as often his answers are like this. The prayer is just one part of a plan he had long before anyone prayed.

One prayer answer I wrote down, which wasn’t even really a prayer, was something Haviylah, a midwife, told me about. She was at a very difficult birth, and inside she was crying out to God for guidance. Something happened with someone at the birth. I don’t remember whether it was the husband or parents of the mother or maybe someone else. All I know is that someone learned something through all the difficulty of the birth. As Haviylah told the story, when that person–whoever it was–spoke about what was happening, something settled inside Haviylah, and she knew that the baby could now be born. The rest of the labor was smooth, and the baby was born in under two hours.

Like it or not, that is like God. He cares about teaching us, and in the midst of difficult situations it is important–crucial–to look for what God is doing and where he is at. There are not many doors out of difficult situations. There’s usually only one door that will bring about the will of God and the best for all who are involved. Those who know to look for it prosper in all circumstances and cause those around them to prosper.

Blessed is the man . . . [whose] delight is in the Law of the Lord and in that Law he meditates day and night. He shall be like a tree planted by rivers of water, which bears fruit in its season. His leaf shall not wither, and whatever he does shall prosper.

The ungodly are not so. . . . [They] shall not stand in the judgment.

~Psalm 1:2-5

Today I had to ransack my memory all the way back to, uh, today.

My wife’s had sciatica off and on for a couple of years. She’s been seeing a chiropractor in Memphis, and for a while that was helping. I happen to believe that most cases of sciatica (nerve pain down the leg) are caused by muscles in the pelvic area, most often the piriformis. However, when the pain started she really didn’t seem to have any tension in that area and piriformis stretches didn’t seem to help, so I let the chiropractor do adjustments instead. Like I said, for a while they did help.

The last few months, though, the sciatica has been returning and increasing, and the visits to the chiropractor weren’t helping. A lot of people were praying for her, and a couple weeks ago as I was praying, God–I believe–told me to take over her treatment. I checked on the muscles around her piriformis, and they were so knotted that she thought at least one was a bone. I took her off all the chiropractor’s exercises, and I had her only do stretches, while I massaged her morning and evening.

The muscles loosened up, but the piriformis is way down deep in the hip, and massage won’t always reach it. The tension in her hip was better, but the pain was still there. I needed some sort of treatment. Sunday night (Dec. 21), some young people came over to my house to pray. I felt like God was telling me I had the right diagnosis on my wife’s pain, but that he didn’t intend to let me treat it without our praying. So I asked the youth to pray. Specifically, I asked them to pray for her to be pain-free by Christmas day.

Yesterday afternoon, my wife called me into her room to watch a youtube video. She spends a lot of time there due to the sciatica. What she showed me was a clip on “Active Release Technique,” a relatively new strategy for dealing with piriformis syndrome (and other muscle injuries). The method on the video was unique, but any strategy for reaching the piriformis muscle was something I would try. I’ve spent a lot of time studying muscles, so I had no problem understanding the areas and angles he said to avoid with this technique.

The end of that story is that I tried it yesterday afternoon and evening, and she hasn’t been back to bed since. She’s spent Christmas day virtually pain-free despite being up the whole day.

#2

John and Frank came back this week from a job in South Carolina that they’ve been on for a few weeks. There they had a boss that was hot-tempered and foul-mouthed. They called back to Rose Creek Village for prayer about how to become friends with the man.

Soon after, that boss saved John from making a bad mistake on the job. He decided to try to do something to say thank you. He went to a store and while he was there he saw Verner’s Ginger Ale and felt led by God to get it for the boss.

You can probably guess what happened next. Maybe I shouldn’t bother with the rest of the story.

Well, okay. It was the boss’s favorite and completely unavailable locally. He was having friends in his home town buy it and ship it to him. He couldn’t believe it, and now they’re friends. John told me today that this boss helped him clean up his site and pack his tools so that John could get on the road early for the trip back here.

Well, my memory’s starting to kick in, so today it was much harder to decide what to put in here. I got an email from Britt, too, telling me a couple. I’ll give you one of his today, and a short one from me.

#1 

 What’s funny is the one I’m going to tell is only from about two weeks ago. One of the ladies–it’s strange referring to her that way when I’ve known her since she was ten–was two weeks past the due date for her pregnancy. The midwives decided to give her castor oil to try to induce labor before they went to the hospital. This mother’s first baby was born in the hospital, and we were really hoping this second one wouldn’t have to be.

One of the sisters in my house told us in tears about the difficulties of the first birth and how she really wanted this mom to be able to have to have the baby at home. This was at breakfast, so our house prayed together, children and all. Sometimes it’s hard to know what to pray, and so, rather than a lengthy prayer telling God how he should help her, I prayed: “Father, please let the baby come quickly and everyone be safe and healthy.” At that point, I felt faith come, and I was pretty sure she’d have the baby that day. I’m not really a great man of faith; it’s hard for me to feel certain about anything, so I was only pretty sure. A better Christian would have had much greater confidence, I’m sure of that.

Anyway, the baby came that night in a two-hour labor! We hardly had time to get the word out and pray during her labor because the baby came so quick.

#2

That first one could have just been a coincidence (yeah, right), so here’s Britt’s. Britt sent me three. I actually liked his third one, which he said was thrown on for free, best. You have to wait for it, though. One at a time.

In his words:

Becca and I were part of group that God hijacked to go to Fiji.  I say hijacked because we were all saving up money to go to Australia for a vacation, but a week before we were supposed to go, we were approached with an opportunity to visit another missionary in Fiji.  We hadn’t finalized our trip for Australia, so it was easy to just shift gears.  Within a week we all had tickets and got stuff together to bless the village in Fiji (it had been hit hard by a hurricane the previous season).

The night before we were to leave, we were all at one family’s apartment, packing up, and one of our group began to complain of some serious pain in her knee that seriously affected her mobility.  Becca was sitting on the floor before this woman with pain in her knee.  Becca just reached out, laid her hand on the woman’s knee, and prayed a very short prayer for healing.  The woman was immediately healed.  The pain was immediately gone.  We really praised the Lord that evening.

Shammah

My story today is old, but it’s one of my favorites, so I want to tell it. Tomorrow I’m going to ask the wife to remind me of some more recent ones. There’s so many that they don’t stand out as awe-inspiring any more. It’s funny, I’ve been in arguments with atheists (and even one Christian!) on the internet about answers to prayer, and as my stories multiplied they started suggesting I was lying. At the start, they told me that the prayers of Christians just evaporate and are pretty much never answered in any meaningful way. I don’t think they were used to a Christian giving them the kind of stories I was giving them, and so many.

This story happened in 1986. Sorry it’s so old, but it did happen to me, and it was pretty amazing. I was in Germany, in the military, and I got a letter from my sister asking for prayer for my nephew, her son, Joseph. He had gotten an infection in his eye, and the doctors couldn’t stop it and didn’t know what it was. It had spread slowly over a year and a half, and the Air Force (she was military, too) had moved her to Andrews AFB so she could be near Bethesda hospital for treatment. By the time she wrote me, my nephew was blind in one eye and had 50% sight in the other.

When I got the letter, I rushed over to a couple’s house (Dan & Melcy Kanitz–Dan, if you find this post, I’d love to find you!) to pray. We prayed, and it was one of those times we could feel the Lord’s presence powerfully. I knew our prayers were being answered. I just had the nagging feeling that we weren’t quite done. We prayed on for quite a while, but I couldn’t get that feeling to go away.

Two weeks later–which means my sister sent the letter a week after we prayed, since mail took a week to Germany at that time–my sister sent me a letter saying that the infection had receded tremendously and that my nephew had all his sight in both eyes. The doctors said he just had a small infection left in one eye, and they believed they’d be able to treat it.

My sister’s letter had held out no hope of finding a cure for my nephew’s infection. A week after we prayed, he was almost entirely cured. I have always believed God left that nagging “not quite done” feeling so that when the infection receded “not quite” all the way, we’d be all the more certain it was prayer and not coincidental timing that had resulted in my nephew’s healing.

The atheists and agnostics on that internet message board I mentioned had no problem writing this event off to coincidence. Of course, once I started adding the myriad other answers to prayer over the twenty years since, coincidence started sounding more and more ridiculous as an explanation. It didn’t matter how much they said “you can only know anything for certain if you conduct a double-blind study.” Yeah, right.

I don’t believe God wants to prove anything to the world by answers to prayer. He wants to prove his power to the world by filling us with an other-worldly love and righteousness, and binding us together in the unity that only a heavenly family can have (Jn. 17:20-23 & 13:34-35). However, it is good for us to be encouraged and our faith built, especially in the midst of a country as unbelieving in the supernatural as America is. That unbelief limits and offends God, who created everything. Let us remind one another of his deeds and proclaim his glory!

Remember, you can add your prayer stories to this series by emailing me.