Back to Blog List

Prayer works-let's do it.
January 14, 2010

We are in over our heads.  The crisis in Haiti has collectively sent a shudder through every caring heart in our world.  So why pray?  If God exists, why did God not prevent this?  

 

I want to address this in part because I want to thank the Globe and Mail readers for the outpouring of their critique of my call to prayer for our military in Afghanistan.  You can read that exchange here and while blogs are inadequate for such a complex response as needed, let me, in light of now an urgent call to pray for Haiti, explain why we pray.

 

We pray because we are people of hope.  We do not pray because we fully understand God, rather, prayer is surrender, a reaching out for help.  When we pray we see harmony  idealized in our mind.  We pray to find the wisdom to see those hopes and dreams become reality. 

 

As a Christian, I am praying to God, and I do believe God exists and I believe God’s expression in the Bible that the world as we know it is on God’s path to redemption.   I am comfortable submitting to God’s advice in Holy Scripture that “I pray about everything.”   In submitting my own logic in prayer to God, I am also submitting myself to God’s declaration that there will be recovery.  Recovery for the brokenness of lives and the brokenness of the cosmos.  Even recovery for the kind of rupture in universal harmony that causes earthquakes like Haiti is reeling from.  

 

I believe God’s invitation to this deep thread of grace that is taking us all to a new tomorrow  – eventually, that day is coming.   

 

As a Christian, I believe that grace began with the arrival of Jesus that God announced in 700 B.C. (Isaiah chapters 7-13), a shift point if you will, on how humanity could experience recovery.  

 

You can study stories collected from over 2,000 centuries of how people experienced that grace for recovery with Jesus.   I’ve been collecting those stories for almost 30 years now, and as a faith based journalist I am regularly asking people for proof, evidence of how they know God heard their prayers.     

 

There are scientific studies that show the beneficial effects of prayer, but I would never hang my hopes on them.  Rather, as a journalist I walk away amazed at what I document in people who have prayed.   They have resources beyond themselves to cope.  They are changed because they have submitted their deep disappointments to the unseen God.  They have shouted, cried, waited, and waited again.  Quietly, things change.  I have a journal I keep of answered prayers.  It is, quite frankly, a stunning collection to me.  And when I start to doubt, I read back and am reminded that I am not alone, I am humbled, and try to repent for being of weak faith.  God always hugs me back, deeply.  

 

So for my Globe and Mail readers, I apologize for any misunderstanding, and thank you for challenging me to clarify my experience with prayer. For the struggle of our military in Afghanistan, or for the crisis in Haiti, I am asking us to simply open our emotions, mind and spirit and sit that weak and human part of ourselves before God. To pray for the families involved, the fear, the need for kindness and generosity in all.   To bring to that  that part of our psyche that so desperately seeks answers and improvements from the pain. 

 

“Prayer is elemental, not advanced, language.  It is the means by which our language becomes honest, true and personal in response to God.  It is the means by which we get everything in our lives out in the open before God,” wrote one of our interview guests,  Eugene H. Peterson.      

 

I have two friends on the ground right now in Haiti assessing the action steps and who will be returning shortly and trying to raise many millions of dollars to help Haiti; Dave Toycen of World Vision, and Rev. Franklin Graham of Samaritans Purse.  I serve on Franklin Graham’s Canadian Board, and I know first hand how dedicated, careful and able to help this organization is.  

 

And I will pray.  I’m using Isaiah 11:3-4, and Isaiah 12 to guide me as I sit, and just place all this worry and concern before God.   I am changed in the process, action points jump to my mind, visuals of people and situations surface that I bring to God.  Prayer moves me to ask my husband uncomfortable questions about how much can we donate, it moves me to mess up the team schedule trying to find a response, and we listen for God to direct us to help.

 

Please pray for the poorest of the poor who need God to embrace them with the reality that God will help them.  

 

---

Comments
Thank you for addressing this. I am always dismayed when a televangelist like Pat Robertson makes comments like he did this week. I refuse to believe that God has punished the people of Haiti for a supposed pact with the devil giving them freedom. We don\'t understand the why but only prayer and action will help the people of Haiti. Not blaming them.
January 16, 2010 | S.Davis

---

Add Comment

Name
Comment
characters left.