Prayer Healing

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June of 2022, that a Bremerton, Wash., high-school football coach was improperly fired for praying with his players after games. That was only the most recent of high court cases involving the question of when prayer on public grounds is and isn’t permissible. Americans, especially American liberals, have been obsessed with the question for more than 60 years.

The idea that prayer is improper at big-time sporting events was forgotten one Monday night, (January 2, 2023). It happened nine minutes into the game between the Buffalo Bills and the Cincinnati Bengals. Bills safety Damar Hamlin, after a routine tackle, stood up and then collapsed. Minutes later, emergency medical staff delivered cardiopulmonary resuscitation. The game was suspended, and suddenly prayer was back on the list of things anybody could talk about or do on camera.

Paycor Stadium, where the Bengals play, is owned by Hamilton County; it’s public property. But no one, so far as I am aware, raised any objection to the midfield prayers offered up that Monday night. That is because the fall of Damar Hamlin demanded a religious response. The ominous way in which the lithe 24-year-old dropped to the turf—not slumping down but falling backward—visibly shocked nearby players and appalled viewers.

Any legal or cultural prohibitions attaching to sporting-event prayers were rescinded. Players knelt, many plainly in prayer. Commentators, rightly sensing the need to go beyond conventional references to “thoughts,” spoke repeatedly of “prayers.” A Bengals fan held up a hastily made placard bearing the words “Pray for Buffalo #3 Hamlin.” Fans from both teams gathered outside the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, to which Mr. Hamlin had been taken, and collectively prayed for the young man.

Suddenly prayer—the ancient activity of speaking to God in the belief that he can hear and respond—was everywhere. Top-level coaches and players, former and present, posted appeals to “Pray for Damar.” Former quarterback Dan Orlovsky, discussing the game with two panelists on ESPN, did the until-now unthinkable: He bowed his head and actually prayed—with two other commentators. The prayer concluded, each said “Amen,” and you felt they meant it.

There is something natural and beautiful in the desire to entreat God to aid a gravely injured man. News reports on Thursday (January 5, 2023) indicate that Mr. Hamlin, against every expectation, is cognizant and able to communicate. Not everyone is surprised.

A poll conducted by LifeWay Research found that many of us are very picky about who we will pray for. For instance, the poll revealed that we typically pray for …

• Family and friends 82 percent of the time
• Our own problems and difficulties 74 percent of the time
• Our enemies 37 percent of the time
• Government leaders 12 percent of the time.

Strangely enough, 36 percent of survey participants said they typically pray for financial prosperity, 21 pray to win the lottery, and 13 percent typically pray for their favorite sports team to win.

Linda was felled by not one but two brain aneurysms. For weeks she lingered on life support, growing weaker each day. As her condition deteriorated, her children were called in to say their goodbyes, and her church prepared for a funeral. Then Linda suddenly snapped out of her coma. As she came to, she looked over at her husband and asked, "Where is everybody else?"

Shaking his head, he explained, "They allow only one of us at a time in the ICU. There is no one else here."

Linda argued, "No, I heard them. They were all speaking at the same time, and there were hundreds of them, too. Some of them I knew; others I didn't. But they were all around me. They were here!"

Linda's husband assured her that all those people had never been in the room. Like many, he initially thought that Linda must have been hallucinating. Some people speculated that Linda had seen and heard angels. But the real answer was probably much closer to home.

A few days after her miraculous recovery, Linda discovered that a large prayer chain had been created to pray for her. This group had been formed when news of her condition was sent out to local churches, and then it had spread to other groups throughout the region. Within days Linda's name had been placed on hundreds of prayer lists and written in scores of prayer logs. For weeks, thousands were praying for her each day. Her miraculous recovery convinced Linda of two things: the voices she heard were of the people who had been praying for her, and those prayers had pulled her back from death's door.

Linda's story is far from unusual. Countless people have been touched by the power of prayer. Science and personal experiences have proven that the words of prayer do have impact. But that impact can't happen unless the ones doing the praying believe their words carry weight.

My responsibility is to pray, God's responsibility is to heal. If he chooses not to do so, then he's responsible for that.

One night my 11-year-old daughter Eva noticed I was distracted as I tucked her in to bed. I told her about a friend's teenage daughter whose hair was mysteriously falling out and I encouraged Eva to pray for Amy. Her simple words, "Jesus, please hold Amy's hair on her head," touched me.

As the doctors experimented with different treatments, Amy continued to lose her hair. Eva continued to pray the same prayer.

After six weeks the doctors determined Amy had alopecia, an extremely rare disorder where hair loss is unpredictable but can be complete and permanent. When I told Eva, she took my hand and closed her eyes. This time her prayer was different. "Dear Jesus, if you won't hold Amy's hair on her head, would you please hold Amy?" Tearfully, I realized how sometimes God doesn't move mountains; he moves us.

I remember reading a story not long ago about the "elevated" in Chicago--a train that when it comes into the downtown, it's on a high track. A young man was riding that train day after day as a commuter. And as the train slowed up for the station where he got off, he could look through an open curtain into a room of a building and see a woman lying in a bed.

She was there day after day, for a long time, obviously quite ill. He began to get interested in her since he saw her every day. Finally he determined to find out her name. He discovered her address, and he wrote her a card, assuring her that he was praying for her recovery. He signed it: "The young man on the elevated."

A few weeks later, he pulled into the station, and he looked through that window and the bed was empty. Instead there was a great huge sign: GOD BLESS YOU, MY FRIEND ON THE ELEVATED!

Having traveled full-time for 14 years doing concerts, I should have packing down to an exact science. But it's simply not so. Our family of four always leaves home loaded with a humiliatingly inordinate amount of excess baggage.

It's possible to go through life with excess emotional baggage as well. Hurts and memories can make us unable to move toward emotional intimacy. It is vital to our spiritual and emotional growth that we identify these hurts, because Christ cannot heal suffering we insist isn't there. And without his healing, the weight of excess baggage will wreak havoc on our capacity to love and be loved.

Several years ago, my father passed away at 88 years of age. During his last adult years, my father lived with us in Texas. Before that he lived in New York City. His family lived in an area of New York called Harlem, in a section of Harlem called Mouse Town, a neighborhood that Reader's Digest said was the toughest section in the United States. The two years before my father came to live with us in Dallas, he was beaten up twice by thugs. Once he was knocked down two flights of stairs and went to the hospital. The second time he was beaten up, he developed a hernia.

My father didn't know what the hernia was, and being a man of simple, perhaps even simplistic faith, he asked God to heal him. But nothing happened. When he finally wrote to me to tell me what had occurred, it was obvious that he was deeply upset. I received his letter in the morning, and by that afternoon I was on a plane to New York. A day or two later, I brought my father back to Texas, where the surgeons successfully operated on him.

My father felt that somehow God had let him down. He had prayed for healing, and the healing had not occurred. I tried to explain to my father that the hand of the physician was the hand of God, but he shrugged all of that off, and the last eight years of my father's life were not good ones. Not only were these years a time of declining health, but he went through them with a diminished faith.

Going to bat in the ninth is nothing compared to praying in an intensive care unit.