Conduits of Prayer (continued)    <prev| page 2 of 5 | next>

by Lynne Hybels

When Shauna was a toddler and Todd was not yet born, I miscarried a boy baby at the midpoint of my pregnancy. After my water broke, the emergency room doctor induced labor, but after three hours of hard labor the dead baby would not deliver. Before inducing labor again, the doctor left me alone in my hospital room to rest. While I rested alone, the baby came. During the previous hours I had anesthetized my heart by believing that my body would be expelling nothing more than an unformed mass of tissue, a blob of faulty cells, a mistake. What I saw instead were perfect little fingers and toes on a seemingly perfect teeny boy body. Eighteen months after Todd’s birth I miscarried twin boys, also at the midpoint of pregnancy. Neither time was there any adequate explanation for the death of the babies. For months, my body had held, had carried, had sheltered those little babies, and in some way I can’t explain now but felt deeply then, I knew them. But in the end, all I had to cradle in my heart was a profound sense of loss and mystery.

Matthew Fox described prayer as “a radical response to the mysteries of life,” (Scott Peck, RLT and Beyond, p. 55), which is why, I suppose, so many of us are drawn to prayer when life ceases to make sense. After the deaths of my babies, I prayed, desperate for help, and something inside me changed. In the silent, wordless prayer of a grieving heart I experienced the Presence whose infinite knowledge held both me and my lost babies in loving awareness. In some way I don’t understand, the process of prayer convinced me then and convinces me still that to be held in divine awareness, no matter what happens, makes all the difference.

Several years ago, my friend Dee, a community worker in the Dominican Republic, called me as hurricane Georges began to wreak havoc across that already-desperate nation. Electricity was out and the water system was shut down, but amazingly the phone lines were open. Dee and her daughters were huddled in the hallway of their home in Santo Domingo, along the Caribbean coast, while her husband was out helping distressed families in the poor barrios surrounding the city. Even over the phone I could hear the roar of the wind, like a jet circling, and the crash of palm trees snapping like toothpicks and pitching against the side of her house. After we talked, I ran down to the Lake Michigan beach and stood with my face to the wind and my arms outstretched. Oh, God, I hold Dee and Tom and their little girls in your presence. I don’t know how long I stood there, bolted to the belief that for some strange reason it mattered that I stand there in that wind and echo those words. In a way I had never experienced before I sensed myself as a link between the power of God and the desperate need of my friends.

A Clarifying Vision

I would not exactly fit in the category of what the church of my youth called a “prayer warrior.” I don’t keep a notebook of prayer requests (though I do have “prayer notes” stuck up on a bulletin board in my office), and I don’t “pray around the world” on different days of the week, though I appreciate people who do. Nor do I have a set format for prayer. In fact, for a long time I didn’t pray at all, at least not in the sense of “interceding” for others, as I am describing here. I didn’t pray because I couldn’t come up with a good reason to pray. People said I should pray because Jesus said to pray and that worked for awhile, but in time my motivation waned and I stopped.

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