Soaking Prayer

It has been a roller coaster of a week, and I doubt this ride will end any time soon.

First off, thank you -- thank you! -- to everyone who prayed for my dad last week. His surgery went smoothly, and the initial reports were favorable. Sadly, that all changed on Thursday when we heard that the pathology reports showed showed cancer -- an aggressive cancer, a cancer that had metastasized. On Friday we heard that the cancer was probably not typically an aggressive cancer, but that it had indeed metastasized.

We are experiencing emotional whiplash.

I have no medical expertise, so I can't explain the differences between small cell cancers and large cell cancers. I don't know precisely what "deep tissue" means. I don't understand how a non-aggressive cancer metastasizes.

But I know Dad is sick.

As my mom declined, I certainly struggled with the big hurdles she faced -- the broken bones and the surgeries -- but some of her little sufferings were the hardest to face.

I remember sitting with her as technician after technician tried -- unsuccessfully -- to get a vein in her emaciated frame.

I remember glancing at a New York Times crossword puzzle -- the puzzle that Mom did every week, in about an hour, in pen, in perfect Cathodic school girl penmanship -- and finding the puzzle a quarter of the way done in a nearly illegible script.

I remember playing Scrabble and in her post-broken clavicle, post-surgical, post-nursing home that damn near killed her haze, my brilliant mother couldn't spell the word C-A-T and, worse still, she knew she couldn't spell C-A-T, knew she was supposed to be able to spell C-A-T, and looked up at me with tears coursing down her sunken cheeks. 

She was slipping, slipping fast. There was no denying it, and it broke my heart.

But this I know: We can pray.

And this I know, too: None of this is wasted. God has numbered our days and counted are tears and continues to work in the midst of our pain and suffering and loss.

Alleluia Community has a gift of intercessory prayer. We have seen a few true miracles -- defied the odds, baffled the experts, made the newspaper kinds of miracles. More often we see less dramatic but in some ways equally as astonishing miracles  --  the young woman diagnosed with terminal cancer who lived an additional nineteen years despite her diagnosis; the husband and father, also diagnosed with terminal cancer, who is going strong twenty-five years later; truly sick people who were not suddenly and completely healed but who went on to live and to love and to serve because of the consistent, soaking prayer offered up again and again and again.

And that's what I ask for my dad -- soaking prayer.

He is the heart of our family, we love him, and we want him to live to be a doddering old man.