From Miracles To Mystery: How Faith Survived My Unanswered Prayers
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(OPINION) I was a wastrel frat boy at the University of Kentucky. Theoretically, I had an academic major, but my real major was hedonism, with a minor in debauchery.
Even though my dad was a Southern Baptist preacher, and I’d been raised going to church three times a week, I’d never found any purchase in religion. I did believe in God — even that was a recent development — but I didn’t believe much in churches or in the majority of Christians I’d met.
I certainly didn’t believe in miracles.
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Then, in my spring semester of 1976, Dad was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, which in those days was as much a death sentence as a diagnosis.
I’ve told this story before, sometimes in significant detail, in newspaper columns and my 1996 book, “Modern-Day Miracles: How Ordinary People Experience Supernatural Acts of God” (now long out of print).
The bottom line is: After our Baptist congregation laid hands on him and prayed, Dad was instantaneously healed. Without treatment. His miraculous recovery was documented by a team of Lexington, Ky., doctors and later confirmed by a second panel of doctors in Washington, D.C. Dad wound up being interviewed on national television, being written about in various publications and being asked on radio shows.
He lived 35 more years without any recurrence of the disease. Instead of dying in middle age, he went to his glory two days shy of his 82nd birthday, of a heart ailment. Truly, his was a wonder of biblical proportions. I’ll go to my own grave testifying to that.
Having seen my dad’s healing up close revolutionized my understanding of God. It changed the direction of my life. I’d beheld something I couldn’t deny.
My parents ended up leaving the Southern Baptists and becoming Pentecostals. I followed them. They started what we formerly would have derided as a Holy Roller church, where we laid hands on the sick and spoke in tongues and prophesied.
I saw a number of additional acts of God, albeit none as mind-blowing as my father’s healing. But for several years, I saw nearly every week interventions from heaven that demonstrated, as we liked to say, “God is still in the miracle business.”
It was heady, happy stuff. We felt as if we enjoyed some sort of special access into God’s throne room that other people seemed not to have tapped into.
It was simple, too. Got a problem? Don’t doubt, don’t waver. Just throw up your hands and shout hallelujah! Ask God to fix it and — wham! — he will!
Until … he didn’t.
As the years passed, something else became obvious, slowly at first. Yes, God was still in the miracle business. But sometimes — and then increasingly often — God didn’t come through with the expected miracle.
Some people didn’t get well. Some people’s finances weren’t exponentially multiplied. Some people’s estranged, errant children didn’t get delivered and return to the fold.
Our health-and-wealth, name-it-and-claim-it doctrines had gaping holes.
God seemed to do only what he wanted to do, when he wanted to do it, and if he didn’t want to do something, there wasn’t any blessed way we could make him. No amount of prayers or positive confessions or fasting made a difference.
Eventually, the 21st Century arrived. In 2000, my wife, 39 years old, was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, just as my dad had been almost 25 years earlier. We did all the right things. Our church anointed her with oil and held prayer vigils and confessed healing over her.
She continued to waste away. In the midst of her sickness, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. The doctors caught it early. Her prognosis was excellent.
“Don’t worry about me,” she told me privately. “I was there when your dad was healed. I know what God can do.”
Two months later, she was dead.
In 2005, after a brutal five-year struggle, my wife died, too. The coroner told me her body weighed 50 pounds.
My mom and my wife were two of the better people I’ve ever known, Christians in the truest sense of that word — people who followed the path of Jesus Christ. They were patient, generous, faithful, loving, humble and accepting of everyone.
If anybody deserved a miracle, they did. Instead, they both suffered and died without reprieve. Our desperate prayers went unanswered.
What do you do with that? That either broadens your faith or destroys it.
What I’ve learned over the decades is that I don’t know a blessed thing about how God doles out signs and wonders, why he clearly intervenes one day and appears to be absent the next.
Miracles are real. They happen. I’d take a lie-detector test on that. But miracles don’t follow any script, any pattern I can recognize, and I’m 50 years into it.
I used to go to church with a guy who was in a terrible wreck when he was young. There were four boys in the car. Three of them died. He survived and went on to have a full life. Three families lost a child. His family got a grand reprieve.
Sometimes it feels random. But it could be that random only means we can’t see high enough.
St. Augustine said it like this: “If you can understand it, it’s not God.”
Faith is permeated with mystery. You can like that or not, but you can’t ignore it. If you live long enough, life hands you contradictions too big for your theology. Eventually, you either have to forsake belief or bow before the Lord’s paradoxes.
On my better days, I hope God sees patterns we can’t. I trust he has a plan, and that his plan is ultimately for our good and his glory.
Still, that doesn’t relieve our pain. We should never rush suffering people toward simplistic religious platitudes. Sometimes the only honest thing a Christian can say is, “I don’t know. I wish I did.”
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a monthly column about faith and religion for Religion Unplugged.