I hurt all of the time and, quite frankly, I am done praying about it. I have spent a year and a half, and somewhere around $5000, going to the doctor and praying about chronic pelvic pain and a serious hormone imbalance, just to be told it is a chronic condition that I can try a couple of things to manage but there is no cure. 8 months after surgery, a major diet change, and starting a medication that I HATED, I burst into tears. I wasn't better. I wasn't getting better.I had just spent the day in what Google decided was labor pain, alienating my family, who had driven two hours to visit me, and having a severe anxiety attack. I was so mad and hurting and stressed over still trying to pay medical bills that I just started weeping. When I went to pray about it, I couldn't. I didn't think God was tired of hearing about it. I was tired of wasting my time praying over it. If God hadn't answered by now, God was not going to answer.
I've been listening through an old (and miraculously still happening) radio program called Adventures in Odyssey. If you didn't grow up in Christian Americana in the 80s and 90s, Adventures in Odyssey is a radio program designed to disciple adolescents and not quite teenagers, they address issues of faith in ways that kids, and me, can relate to. Some of those are bid and difficult topics, including human trafficking and spiritual warfare, and some are simple, like lying. There's an episode called The Other Woman that addresses unanswered prayers. In it we learn that a main character's never seen wife is mentally ill and living at an institution. Another character questions why the wife and her illness are never mentioned, even at church. Surely, if there is a place someone could go for help and prayer, it would be the Christian community he was part of. They could pray for her. It is explained that early on the church was praying for her but, as time went on and she didn't get better, it got harder and harder to ask.
We get frustrated when prayer seems to go unanswered, when it seems like God is withholding healing. We get tired of praying for healing.
When I complained about it, a good friend reminded me that when God says "no" it means that God has something better in store. They mean well but this is a "Christianese" saying that gives me a lot of church angst. Let me tell you something important. THERE IS NOT SOMETHING BETTER THAN BEING HEALTHY. There isn't. God doesn't have something better than being healthy and able. I can say that with absolute certainty. God did not create us to live our lives in pain. There isn't something better. There isn't something better than being able to be part of my friend's wedding without having to be on three different pain killers.
There might, however, be something more important.
If I accept the idea that God answers our prayers certain ways for specific reasons and that God has plans for our lives, then I have to accept that there is a reason God said no to healing me for a reason that is more important than what I want.
"But where does that leave us," the character asked at the end of the episode.
"It leaves us where we've always been: stuck with the frailty of our humanness, dependent on the power of God's will, obliged to keep praying hard..."
Not exactly comforting when you are exhausted of praying.Exhausted of praying, exhausted of being sick, exhausted of everything. Where is the hope in being told no to healing?
I don't know.
I do know that at the same time that I was on the floor crying that the mail was delivered. A letter from the child I sponsor in Sierre Leone among the stack of medical bills and inside of that, a white and brown quilt patch was in the envelope as well. "Hope" stitched into the fabric.
In prayer, yes even when we are exhausted, God refills our hope. Our hope for healing or for something more important than healing. That hope won't be refilled if I don't keep praying... hard. Through all of the frustration and pain there are moments when God refills our hope. Right now, I don't find that helpful. I'm too tired. Someday, though, I hope it might.
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