Someone asked me recently what the point of prayer was when the people she is praying for die anyway. It’s a legitimate question and is probably in the back of everyone’s mind. Will I be the lucky one? Is there a formula for being blessed? Will my prayer be the one that gets answered?
This is a heart wrenching question that many people have written books about, but it is one that we are all struggling with, as a friend’s father that I had been praying for died just this week. There are easy answers and hard ones. One easy answer is that we are finite. Our bodies are not perfect. We get sick and sometimes we don’t have the resources to recover. One easy answer is social sin. We pollute creation, our healthcare system is not fair, we don’t invest in health as we should, personally or nationally.
But those answers offer us no comfort.
Neither do the hard ones. Let’s take a couple things off the table. We can’t earn God’s love, we can’t bargain for God’s favor. It is almost impossible for us to imagine a scenario where we are completely and eternally loved as equally as the person standing next to us, but it is true. God loves us beyond our capacity to measure or understand. We are each absolutely beloved.
I also believe in all my being that God’s heart is broken by suffering and death. God lives every day with the consequence of giving us free will, just as we do. We do not begin to take advantage of the consolation and compassion that God offers us in every grief, big or small. We choose to engage with God or not, depending on our mood, even though God is waiting to flood us with love. I know that I do anyway.
I do not believe that God picks and chooses who lives and dies. I don’t believe that God has a magic wand. I do believe that God can do anything, so when God “chooses” to let people die, I get very angry. But anger is a stage of grief, and a reasonable response to loss. So is it really God that I am mad at, or God that I trust enough to love me and hold my anger?
When I pray for God to intervene, I know that means that I also have work to do. I can’t expect God to engage and fix when I am not willing to be a part of it. God is always willing to work with us, and gives us the skills we need to live into God’s call to build the Kingdom of God. When I ask God to heal someone, I have to work on my own healthy response to the world, my own relationship with the one who I am praying for, my support of their family, my kindness to those who are caring for them, or whatever I can do to help. I can’t pass the baton to God and expect a miracle. Sometimes we have to be kind of miraculous too, a sign of love in the world.
And…
And a part of me believes that God does intervene. I still ask God for a miracle most days, things I think are beyond me but I just know are the right thing. I hold on to hope. I want my way, my desired outcome. And most of the time I believe that God agrees with me. It isn’t rational, but neither is faith. I hold on to God’s infiniteness, God’s expansiveness, God’s big picture, and I trust. And when things are not what I want them to be, I have to take a deep breath, believe in God’s love, and keep walking the path.
I told the woman who asked me that I didn’t know the answer. I don’t understand why bad things happen. And that is true. In that moment of her grieving she didn’t need theology or explanation, she needed compassion. I told her I was so sorry and that I loved her and that I didn’t have a good answer. But I have thought about it, prayed about it, and this is my more complete answer to an unanswerable question.