I wrote a book with the title, Pray for Me, about a medical misadventure I faced and how prayers buoyed me up through the process.
That was almost six years ago. Guess what? I’m back at the same hospital, staying in the same wing, feeling some of those same symptoms: shortness of breath, a fever, fatigue. Happily this is not due to COVID. Had the vax, and I’ve tested negative.
But geez? Back here again. Facing another medical mystery. What I’m reminded of is how much time there is for prayer when you’re a patient. You’re waiting for a test, waiting to be moved to a new room, waiting to go for another test, waiting for the doctor and/or nurse to show up. All that waiting.
I smiled to myself. Physician, heal thyself. Or rather Mr. Big Talker about Prayer, use this time to pray for others.
Last night I was in a room with a guy—turned out to be a neighbor—suffering from cancer. He’d just had treatment and thought he was done and now…this. New lesions on his legs so that he can’t even walk. Can’t do his work as contractor.
Quite frankly getting to hear his story helped me. It got me out of myself, out of my worries, my fears. Fifteen years younger than I, he deserves a rich life ahead. When he went off for a CT scan, I prayed for him. But just hearing his story, two patients connecting in an ER, well that felt like a prayer itself.
I would be lying if I didn’t say I could use your prayers for me. For strength, courage, resilience, healing. I hate to put my wife through the caregiving turmoil again. But I have much trust in the doctors and what they do. They are healers. Gifted with healing powers.
Medicine, when it works best for me, is this combination of the clinical, the practical and the spiritual and emotional. All of them working in tandem with God. The Trinity can be a confusing concept at times, but one message I take from it is that God works in tandem. Or triplicate. Love works that way, too.
So pray for me. And I’ll pray for you. It helps pass the time. No telling where this journey will go. Any day now we’re expecting the birth of our first grandchild. To be born here in this same hospital.
Isn’t that alone a wonderful sign of how God works? The new with the old and all of it part of the eternal. Godspeed.
