When The Prayer For Healing Is Unanswered

A young mother was disappointed when the prayer for her six week old baby went unanswered.

Due to the advances of modern medicine and the skills and knowledge of pediatricians, babies get hearing tests very early in life. This little one has a "severe" hearing deficit in one of her ears. Of course this young mom wants her newborn to be well. I do too. The baby is my granddaughter.

A daughter from a different family called me this week. She was praying for her alcoholic mom to respond positively to the intervention and agree to enter a treatment center. The mom rejected the offer and chose alcohol.

Desperate prayers for loved ones with addiction, suicide ideation and/or mental illness are cried by families watching self-destructive behavior ruin a life and a family.

I've attended and officiated funerals for people who died after an extended illness. They, their friends and families prayed for healing from cancer.

In this common responsibility of our calling to care for people with prayer for healing, we are confronted with a crisis of belief for both ourselves and those we care for when our prayers are not answered in the way we requested.

When there are no answers, we should not manufacture one.

In Living with Loss, One Day at a Time, Rachel Kodanaz describes an appropriate response for "unspeakable grief." "One cannot speak when there are no words to truly articulate the feeling of overwhelming sadness, the inability to comprehend the loss, and the continual search each day for the will to carry on... While we may not be able to speak in words, we are speaking--in love, loss and the desire to remember." (p. 4)

Similarly, we may not be able to care with words, as we wait for answers or face the disappointment of a result different than our request. So we care with presence, listening and empathize with a questioning soul.

Books like Philip Yancey's, Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference, help us keep our faith in an all wise, listening and caring God during these times of mystery and anguish when our words fail us.

And then, if our faith survives this crisis, we can keep praying and experience the answer at another time or discover a different answer or find the strength and comfort to keep living as we "ask, seek and knock" (Matthew 7:7) for the answer.

So, I will maintain my care for both of these daughters with presence, listening, empathy and continued prayers of petition and questioning.

When we persist in our prayers, even when they appear unanswered, we grow in our faith, experience God's work beyond our expectations or desires and support a person so that their faith survives and they can keep on living and searching.

When you care for others with prayer, what you do matters.