When The Best Answered Prayers Sing Beauty

Putting the Genie Back in the Bottle

When people crow about how God answered prayer and healed so-and-so, my first thought is about Benny. Benny was a ten-year-old kid I met in the Hospital for Crippled Children. Benny was there for surgery to be able to close his eyes again.

The first time I saw him, I nearly fainted. His entire body looked like it had melted. This was pretty true—the story went that he and his sister tried to cook scrambled eggs on a propane stove that blew up. He had no hair, no ears, only part of a nose. This kid could star in a B monster movie.

But Benny could still walk. We two were the only students at hospital school who could sit in regular desks. So, I began to pray for him. None of it was fair. The God I thought I knew would surely realize the injustice and heal his burns. Although I prayed and prayed, Benny’s scars didn’t disappear, although I do hope the operation to close his eyes was a success.

 The thing is, I’ve never liked to pray. I know, Paul says to do it without ceasing, but prayer has always made me vaguely uncomfortable. Jesus says, “ask for anything,” but that sounds a bit like a genie granting wishes. Jesus tells me to go into my secret prayer closet, but often I go in there and only hear my sobs echoing off the walls. And now, on a national stage, folks are shouting about how God is on their side, that the grace of God spared the life of the nominee.

Benny had a pretty good reason to hate everything.

All I can say is that the same grace appeared to be absent for the poor guy who died. And it so often feels like our prayers for healing are floating up to a Healing Lottery in the Sky. I don’t know about you, but if I was God, I’d never ever let some poor five-year-old die of brain cancer or be burned to a crisp like Benny.

What are we to do about prayer?

Like most Christians, I was brought up to pray. Now I lay me down to sleep ended my every bedtime and in the Hospital for Crippled Children, I prayed for Benny, and I prayed really hard to go home. I also prayed that Jensen, an aide who dug her fingernails into your wrist to take a pulse, would suddenly find a new job or mysteriously fall out the third-story window.

I could understand why God ignored my prayers to kill off Jensen. In all my fourth-grade years, nobody I’d ever wished would keel over actually did. Like that kid in my class who made fun of my heavy metal arm brace. My prayer for him was to wallop him with said brace.

What I couldn’t get was why all of us crippled kids had to stay crippled. After all,every single nightI prayed that God would make us all normal—I even made sure to keep my good hand on the actual Bible under my pillow. But in the morning, every one of us—including Benny—was the same.

My prayers for healing have struck out ever since. Asking God for miracle healings—you know, stuff that’s quantifiable—has not resulted in any prayer gold. Loved ones still face cancer, spiral into addiction, slowly lose their minds.

When others shout that God healed or spared them, I cringe. All I can think of is the children I knew from that hospital, so bravely facing their disabilities with surgery after surgery. I think of people I know whose loved one has died prematurely, of those I know who are watching the love of their life slowly slip away. I think of a person I know who has to watch her spouse succumb to an ever-growing brain tumor. Why haven’t their prayers caught God’s attention?

Maybe it’s all in how you see prayer.

I’ve stopped making prayer all about God the genie, handing out favor according to some heavenly algorithm. I no longer pray in order to get. Instead, I’m praying for God’s love to increase in this world, for peace in a nation that’s tearing itself apart. I’m praying to be thankful and praise the earth and all its creatures. And I’m praying for comfort for all of us who long for healing but settle for God’s loving kindness.

You see, Benny had a pretty good reason to hate everything. This kid couldn’t even blink. I’m pretty sure I’d be in a rotten mood 24/7 if people ran from me screaming that they’d seen a monster. But Benny wasn’t bitter or mad at the world. He smiled (OK he tried to smile) through his horrible ordeal. And one day in hospital school, he passed me a note, written in pencil, folded up as tiny as he could make it. It read: YOUR BEAUTY IS LIKE NO OTHER.

I still have that little note. It reminds me to step back from supplication and wants/demands and learn to think differently about prayer.  Instead of crowing when I get my way or shaking a fist when God seems not to be listening, I take a moment to be astonished by the blue sky or thrilled by the order of stars in our cosmos. And I pray for Benny, that those he meets can see past his scars and thank God for the beauty of a boy who saw beauty in me.