More than “Get Well Soon”
The “Get Well Soon” card may be a bit of a thing of the past, but I can recall at least a few times over the years of either sending or receiving one due to a more severe illness or injury.
It’s understood that a “get well soon” card doesn’t come with medicine to cure an illness. It doesn’t come with a device to help heal an injury. It doesn’t generate more white blood cells, or produce higher iron levels, or provide an increase in overall energy. It doesn’t really aid toward any actual recovery, so much as it helps a person feel loved, cared for, thought of, and appreciated amid their attempt at recovery.
It’s my concern that we think of prayer in much of the same way, at least at some subconscious level. When we text, “Praying for you” or when we ask, “How can I pray for you?” (things we should still do), I think we’re often thinking more in terms of wanting that person to feel loved, cared for, thought of, appreciated, than we are in terms of the belief that God will actually hear our prayer and do good to that man or woman because of our prayer.
The Bible doesn’t talk about prayer that way, but rather depicts prayer as ministry. As something that God, in his sovereignty, and according to his providence, actively chooses to hear, respond to, and work through for the benefit of people. Prayer, in other words, is not a matter of saying, “I hope you get well soon,” but a matter of, “I am going to ask God, the one who knows me, loves me, and calls me his child, the one who bought me with the blood of his perfect son and who hears me when I call to him, the one who created this world, upholds this world, stands as king over this world, spoke into existence every atom and creature and human being in this world, the one who is the epitome of goodness and the source of all wisdom and who is bottomless in love, I am going to ask him, to do good, to you.”
But you say, “I don’t get how that works – he’s sovereign and yet he responds to our prayers?” You say, “I don’t know how he does it if it’s not my will, but thy will be done?”
But do you know that your Father is powerful? Do you know that he only ever does what is good? Do you know that he never tires of hearing your voice? Do you know that he neither slumbers nor sleeps? Do you know that he’s invited you to pray to him? That your prayers don’t fall on deaf ears? They don’t get lost in the mail? Do you believe that he’s worked through prayer before? How many trillions of times before! Do you know he intends to do so again?
If so, then you know, all that you need to know, to pray regularly and passionately and confidently for others. Prayer is ministry. Prayer is productive. And so we should pray.