‘Thoughts and prayers’—I’ve come to believe they’re working for me

How do you pray when you’re caring for someone with a progressive, debilitating disease?

How do you pray for someone else facing a diagnosis that offers little hope?

And, perhaps even more to the point, why pray at all?

Urgent and essential

David Bashevkin offered a defense of prayer in the face of despair as the nation was reeling after the Uvalde school shooting. Politicians, typically, had repeated the cliché response, “Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of the victims.” And activists, typically, had replied with anger, “Forget the thoughts and prayers! We need action!”

Bashevkin, writing in the Wall Street Journal, agreed that policy measures are vital and then quickly added, “But what’s gained by attacking [the] use of prayerful language? We don’t need a moratorium on prayer to stop school shootings.” He believes prayer creates a framework and builds resolve to pursue action about issues as crucial as this one. “Prayer is the language we use to express our most urgent and essential desires,” he wrote.

More and less

And so, faced with the urgent and essential desires threatened by Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s or cancer, how do you pray?

I ask the question not as an expert with answers but as a seeker with questions. Indeed, I’ve said several times, “The older I get, the more I pray, and the less I understand about prayer.”

And since January when we went public with news about Evelyn’s illnesses, I’ve been flooded with assurances from others that they are praying for us. Several, even some I’ve known only casually or with whom I haven’t spoken for years, have said, “I pray for you every day.” Facebook comments and private emails are peppered with promises to pray.

And I pray too. I’m living in the first generation of senior citizens with access to social media, and so I’m encountering more death and disease and disaster among my peers than would have been possible to discover even 20 years ago. Every week I learn about another dire need or desperate situation in the life of someone I know or know about, and I pray for them. At least I try to remember to pray for them.

Sometimes I pray for healing, but always for peace and joy. I invoke the Scripture’s promise to grant wisdom to those who seek it. I make the same requests for myself, often in ragged, sentence-fragmented, not-for-publication pleas.

That’s the kind of prayer I uttered one day last summer.

Question and answer

It was August, and I had contacted Evelyn’s neurologist’s office in May to say, “We haven’t seen you since the beginning of Covid. Shouldn’t we be coming in for a visit?” I love her doctor, but I think in the press of the pandemic, we had fallen through the cracks.

The earliest available appointment would be in December, but I had been assured we’d be contacted if a cancellation came before then.

I had called again in June. And July. Nothing.

But I wasn’t thinking about the doctor that warm August morning as I walked through the neighborhood praying. I was simply alone with the reality of the burden we’d been given, and finally I whispered, “God, if you’re real . . . if you’re really real, it would sure be nice for you to show me.”

By the time I got back to the house, I’d wiped away tears, and I forgot the prayer. Sometime that afternoon my phone rang.

“Hello, I’m calling from Dr. Sawyer’s office,” was the greeting. Dr. Sawyer is our neurologist. “We have a cancellation tomorrow, and I’m wondering if you’d like to come see him then?”

“Oh. Yes. We. Would,” I said without hesitating. I didn’t even check our calendar. We’d change any plan to make this appointment.

It was at that August visit the doctor suspected the presence of Parkinson’s as well as the previously diagnosed Alzheimer’s. Tests the next month confirmed his suspicion, and we began the Parkinson’s medicine in September, three or four months earlier than would have been possible without that last-minute August opening.

Later, I don’t remember when, I realized God had answered my prayer.

The skeptic will hear my story and call it a coincidence. Maybe so. But as more than one person has said, “I just seem to have more coincidences when I pray!”

More prayer, less understanding

And so I continue to pray, along with faithful friends from many corners. And it dawned on me this week as I thought about all of this, The prayers are helping.

Even in spite of all my hand-wringing on this blog, even with the daily reminders that Evelyn definitely is sick, we’re not in crisis. Our life is pleasant. Sometimes difficult, always different. But pleasant.

I understand that experiences with these two diseases will be different. Progression varies from case to case. I speak with others whose patient’s degeneration is much quicker and has become much more severe than Evelyn’s. Maybe her slower slide is due to good diet or her previous regimen of walking or her years of study and teaching.

And maybe it’s because we’re praying. Maybe God in his goodness is allowing me to adjust, to learn, to acknowledge so that I’ll be ready for more difficult days to come.

I don’t know. The more I pray, the less I understand about prayer. But like the Journal columnist, I’ll stay committed to praying.

The letter of James, close to the end of the New Testament, offers the promise I’ll choose to believe: “The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results” (James 5:16, New Living Translation).

I’ll say to praying friends, invariably more righteous than I (but none more earnest), “Keep it up!” Because I realize, when I stop to take stock of our situation, God is keeping his promise. All this praying is producing something, a result that is indeed . . . wonderful.