Hedging or Believing

I have been thinking a lot lately about how our prayers for those in d
ire need are a litmus test of our faith in God.  Think back to the last time you lifted up someone, say for example, who was sick even to the point of death.  Did you pray out of obligation because you know that's what you do when something very important is out of our hands?  Did you plead with the Almighty from a place of desperation and desire?  Did you invoke a sense of His goodness and might being on the line, that to answer Your prayer would bring glory to Him?




My own faith is up and down, and so I toggle between all of these postures and more.  But I'd have to say my most common reaction is to ask God to work His loving power on behalf of His child, and to ask Him to grant her and all of us who know her a sense of assurance that in sickness and in health He is still in charge and doing good.

Even then, there are two places I can be coming from when I do this.  One lacks faith, which is that I am hedging: I want God to heal, but I want to brace myself and others if He doesn't.  Or, said another way, I know God can heal, but in case He doesn't I don't want to get my hopes up too high nor my trust in Him.  If I am being honest, I am here a lot.

But this is a prayer that can also be prayed with deep and abiding faith.  It is a prayer that says as Job, "Naked I came from my mother's womb, And naked I shall return there. The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away. Blessed be the name of the LORD."  It comes from a place that doesn't discount the gravity of an illness or the devastation that illness may wreak, but that values even more highly that in health and in sickness God is ever God and we are ever His people.

How do we pray?  How do we let people know that their struggle matters, that they matter, that for them to suffer and for us to lose them would be devastating?  And, simultaneously, that God is God no matter what, and that He is honored through miraculous healing yet is no less loving or mighty when such healing does not come?  These are the matters of faith I wrestle with.