Anguish and Intimacy
Yesterday morning I had planned to write these few paragraphs on prayer, but I got ambushed by prayer—the real thing—and never had the chance to write about it until today. While preparing to write yesterday I felt an insistent interior nudge to email Dee in the Dominican Republic. I was sending her a casual email when I suddenly felt compelled to pray for Dee and her three young daughters. Furthermore, I seemed to have received a very specific prayer to pray. “I pray for safety, for protection, and for health for you and the girls,” I wrote to Dee, “and that the people around you will give you what you need.”
I sent the email, then promptly burst into tears. I was not whimpering, not sniffling, not politely dabbing at dainty tears. I was sobbing, heaving, snorting uncontrollably. Two massive fists were squeezing from my heart great drops of love which were pouring down over my mind’s images of Dee and Tom and their girls—Aisha, Alina, and Alize. I pulled myself together long enough to call several friends and ask them to pray, then spent the rest of the morning alternating between crying and praying. By the time my son came home from work for lunch I was exhausted. “You seem mellow, Mom,” he said, but he didn’t know the half of it. I was thoroughly wrung out.
The next day I received an email from Dee, giving me an update on the family’s activities. Dee and Tom had been extraordinarily busy, training American work teams that had come to build houses, traveling between scattered worksites, translating from English to Spanish and back again in interactive discussion groups, and planning a summer camp program for poor children. Meanwhile the girls had to be carted from morning preschool to afternoon summer club, then home for quiet family time before bed. “It sounds crazy,” wrote Dee, “and it is, but it is also very fulfilling. And I have felt support and encouragement from the team members. Everyone knows I need help so they have jumped right in to do what they can. Thanks for your prayers.”
Why did I spend a morning praying and crying for my friends? How, specifically, were my prayers and my tears connected with their lives? Was there a tragedy in the making that was miraculously averted through the power of my prayers and tears? I don’t know. But I’ll be glad to waste another morning in prayers and tears, if ever I am so moved. I can’t prove this, but I believed while I prayed, and I believe still, that during that time of anguish and prayer something in me had slipped beyond the bounds of the material world and was operating in a parallel universe, a universe invisible and yet more real than anything I could see with my eyes, and that what was happening in that invisible realm had direct impact on the visible world in which Dee and Tom and their precious little girls moved through a demanding day.
If you’re wondering why I have spoken at such length about my friend Dee, it’s because it’s hard not to talk about the people for whom we prayer. Intercessory prayer forges intimacy. This may be a selfish dimension to my prayer life, but I can’t deny it. I crave intimacy. That’s why I seek an experiential faith. That’s why I pray to God. That’s one reason I pray for others. I guess I really do believe in those spiritual conduits connecting us with God and with the people for whom we pray. This strikes me as incredibly profound and wonderful. It’s magic of the best sort and I am deeply grateful for it. It brings tears to my eyes if I think intently enough about it.
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