Lakesha survived, and she is now a healthy and vigorous ten-year-old.
Tom, a physician who has practiced neurology for some thirty years,
notes the importance of prayer in the face of medical difficulties:
In my office, we see so many people who have emotional needs,
who have no background of prayer or hope. And for those
people we have to pray that somehow God will guide us in helping them to see that there is more to their problem than just the
physical. There’s an emotional and, more importantly, a spiritual
aspect. When we can no longer provide physical relief, then we
must try to impart spiritual help. And sometimes, all we can do at
that point is pray for them and, in rare instances, pray with them.
Prayer sometimes opens up a whole new venue to these people,
which they had never known before.
There are also times when we’re doing everything that is
medically possible, and still there is the inevitable – that over the
next couple of weeks the patient will probably die. Then I tell the
patient and his family that they need to make the most of what
is left of life, but even more, they really have to start looking to
and understanding the great and larger picture of what life is all
about. And that kind of thing requires us to talk about a belief
in God, and to say at that point that we have transcended what
medicine can do, and now our hope has to be in something
other than the physician and in something other than ourselves.
It also happens at the opposite end, that the path we’ve
pursued has not been correct with regard to the diagnosis or the
therapy. Then it becomes the task of the physician to pray; he
has to start looking beyond himself to God, asking for help and
guidance in what he’s doing. And sometimes he must ask for
forgiveness.
I often find that when you tell a patient there is nothing you
can do, through no fault of your own, the patient becomes
angry – not only at the physician, but angry at everybody. Then
I will frequently sit down and talk, not about physical things, but
spiritual things. Because at such a time, when a patient is dying,
the family and the patient start to understand the whimsical and
fleeting nature of life. It’s an opportunity for a physician to be a
better physician. We are no longer dealing with biochemistry,
physiology, anatomy. We’re dealing with an area of medicine we
don’t understand, but an area that can truly give the patient
more comfort, more hope, than we could give ourselves.
It’s a leap of faith at that point, and we have to help the
patient make that leap. We have to say, “Look, there’s nothing
we can do medically, but there are other things that can be
done.”
There are times when serious illness or tragedy strikes so forcefully
that one hardly dares to ask God for what might seem an impossible reversal of fate. In such an hour, our relationship with God
takes on a rare and unforgettable intensity. A friend, Jonathan,
recalls such an incident:
I remember one night when I was a third- or fourth-year medical
student. I was working in the emergency room, and in came a
man who had just had a horrible mining accident. His head was
crushed: blood and tissue and fluid were everywhere, and yet he
was still alive, his heart was still going. The emergency crew came
swooping in, ten or twenty people with machines and electricity
and everything. I was standing on the side.
Then Rod, our neurosurgeon, pushed them all aside and
pulled a curtain right around the patient, beckoning me in. He
put his arm around me and said, “Now is a time when we are
thankful we believe.” That’s all he said. And he put his hand on
that man’s shoulder, and the two of us just stood there silently
until the man stopped breathing. Tears were coming down my
face. I was totally shaken up; I had never seen anything so traumatic before. I looked at Rod, and tears were pouring down his
face. And behind the curtain were all these professionals who
thought they could save this man. I’ve never forgotten it. There
are times when you must simply stop and let God take charge.
I experienced something similar in the death of Fritz, a man I knew
as a child in South America. Fritz came to the Bruderhof in 1927,
drawn by its radical social outlook and its practice of total community. He had just completed a rigorous blacksmith’s
apprenticeship, but was also skilled in other areas of manual labor,
including building. He considered himself a member of the “true
proletariat” and was a convinced Socialist, disillusioned with the
churches and with previous political involvements. Fritz hoped that
something new would come from within the labor movement.
At the end of that year, death came unexpectedly to the little
community. A one-year-old child died of smoke inhalation when
green wood was used to stoke the stove in the room where she lay
sleeping. Fritz, who previously had thought little of religion, was
deeply shaken; in fact, the incident brought about his first real
turning to faith.
Twenty years later, at the end of 1947, Fritz was working on a
lathe, turning a large ring-like base for a Christmas wreath.
Suddenly the wood cracked and the ring broke loose, spinning
upward and striking Fritz on the forehead, just above the right eye.
My great-aunt Monika, a nurse, arrived at the scene very quickly
and found the injury to be large and deep. She bandaged it to stop
the bleeding, but soon Fritz began to vomit. Later at the hospital,
an examination revealed that he had suffered a depressed skull
fracture. Apart from cleansing the wound and stitching it, nothing
could be done. Fritz’s condition was critical and he was in great
pain, yet he was still able to sing Christmas carols with those who
gathered around his bed. The next day he developed a high fever.
Two days later he became unconscious.
Four nights after the accident, Fritz’s condition began to deteriorate rapidly. Paralysis had started on the left side and soon
progressed to the other side. There were blood clots in the largest
vessels of the brain, and copious pus. A prayer meeting was called
at 5:45 a.m. and earnest appeals were made to God to save Fritz.
As if things weren’t difficult enough, outward circumstances in
the community put great strain on the small medical staff and
made the situation even harder. The same night, a child at the
hospital required an emergency tracheotomy; hours later my wife’s
mother, Margrit, gave birth to her eleventh child. Throughout the hospital, meanwhile, other patients were groaning in their suffering.
Several times during the next day, friends and relatives met to
intercede for Fritz, and that evening they gathered to pray and
read from the New Testament. Then they went to sing outside his
window. The songs were a true communal prayer – the words fitting the need of the hour, and the music an expression of unity and
of the longing that everything be done in harmony with God’s will.
Fritz died during the singing. Everyone stood there for a long
time in silence. Fritz was a vigorous, strong man, forty-two years
old – and now he was gone, leaving a wife and six children. The
grief was overwhelming, and so was the renewed realization of
man’s smallness and frailty.
Susanna, an eight-year-old
whose parents I have known for
years, was diagnosed with a serious condition when she was four.
Fortunately, her mother, Becky, is a nurse and her father, David, an
EMT. Becky writes:
It was a sticky July day. We had taken our children for a late-afternoon swim and were preparing for dinner when the phone
rang. It was our family doctor. Could we bring our four-year-old
daughter back to his office that evening? He wanted to run another test on her.
We had noticed that something was wrong with Susanna.
She was constantly fatigued: she would play hard for a minute
or two, then flop down to rest. Did she have mono? She would
scream whenever we went on a walk. Was it behavioral? She
complained of stomach pain and her breath smelled strange. Did
she have tonsillitis or strep throat? What was going on? Whatever it was, we hoped it would pass.
But it didn’t. And now our doctor, who had seen her earlier
that afternoon, wanted us to come again, after hours. We knew
it must be something serious
.
When we got to the office,
Susanna was taken into an exam room, and our doctor came
straight to the point: “Susanna has diabetes.” Relief washed
over me. At least it wasn’t a death sentence like leukemia or osteosarcoma. I knew diabetes was serious, but being a nurse, I was
confident that it was something we could handle easily enough.
But I was wrong.
Type 1 diabetes is a condition in which the pancreas stops
producing insulin, so that blood-sugar levels go extremely high.
A diabetic patient must be given insulin injections every day, and
blood-sugar levels must be monitored several times a day to be
sure they do not go too high or too low, which could lead to seizures or loss of consciousness or even death.
Overnight, my husband and I became Susanna’s pancreas.
It’s a twenty-four-hour a day job with no vacation…Three to four
insulin injections and six to eight finger pricks daily. There are
also the complexities of her diet, and the adjustments that need
to be made each day depending on her present blood-sugar
level, her activity, and even her emotional state – all these affect
how the body uses sugar.
Susanna’s outlook is serious, as she has “brittle” diabetes.
Doctors say she has one of the most carefully supervised diet and
insulin regimens they have seen. Yet her blood-sugars range
wildly, and her overall level of control, as shown by blood tests,
remains poor. She has not yet suffered any of the typical complications of diabetes: retinal damage, poor kidney function, and
injury to the blood vessels and nerves in the legs. But we are always in a tension between keeping the blood-sugars low
enough so that long-term complications are avoided, and yet
not allowing them to drift too low. We try our best, but we know
that ten or twenty years from now, the specialists will probably
look at us and say, “You should have controlled her blood-sugars better when she was a child.”
Of course, with seven, eight, or even nine needle pricks a day, there
is always the behavioral component to consider. Susanna has come
to accept her condition without complaint, and remains a spunky
third-grader who holds her own in a lively family with seven other
children. She loves animals, running games, and the outdoors.
Still, it is a strain on her caregivers, because there is the constant
possibility of making a mistake. Calories must be counted carefully,
and an estimate of the nutritional value of every food item has to
be considered in light of what Susanna is doing that day. With two
types of insulin, there is the possibility of giving her an injection
from the wrong vial. Once when Becky was in Boston for a diabetes
conference, she called home to say what time she would be back.
She was told that David was on the telephone with the hospital
because he had given the wrong insulin. Such an incident may seem
insignificant, but for Susanna’s family it was hardly a small thing.
Yet that is just where they say prayer comes in.
Becky continues:
What do we want for Susanna? What do we pray for? Our
prayer for her is not that different from what we wish for each
one of our eight children (although for Susanna it is magnified
because of her condition): that she can lead as carefree and as
selfless a life as possible.
We have trust that God can do all things, and that he can
heal her if it is his will. We have thought about this over the past
years but have never ourselves prayed for complete healing for
her, though it is not in any sense of unbelief. We do not question why Susanna has this condition. But we do know that God
speaks to us through our daughter and through her disease.
If some child on earth needs to be burdened with a medical
disorder, we would prefer that it is our daughter rather than a
child in a Third-World country. We have availability of medical
care, a caring community around us, and a supportive church. As
for Susanna, she has trust in God’s plans for the future. She is
certain that when God’s kingdom comes, she will be cured.
Healing can take place in different ways, not always in the form we
imagine and hope for. There is physical healing, and there is also
inner healing – freedom or relief from fear of the unknown and
fear of death. Sometimes neither seems to be given us. Ultimately,
though, our prayer must be that whatever happens, God’s will is
done, not ours.
Dale and Carole
moved to our community more than twenty years
ago. Carole battled depression most of her life, and although medications were helpful, she and Dale went through many hard times
together.
Several years ago Carole was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was
a fairly aggressive type, but it was caught early and had not spread
too far, so the outlook was good. Although Carole’s specialists
thought surgery alone would be sufficient, she was keen to go
through chemotherapy as well. So she underwent the painful and
disfiguring surgery, and then bravely proceeded through chemotherapy, a dose every two weeks for six months.
Carole was granted a complete remission for the next two years.
However, early in 1998 she had chest and bone pain, and an X-ray
showed a spread of the cancer to her lungs. Carole’s outlook, even
with further therapy, was very poor. But she was not one to give up
easily. Though she declined further chemotherapy, her attitude
more than made up for that. What she faced is something to be
envied: eternity. It is something each one of us faces every day,
whether we realize it or not, because none of us knows when death
will come. One of the most valuable lessons we can ever learn is
that life is meaningful only in the context of eternity.
Carole was well aware that she might not live long. Her prayer
was simply to become an instrument for God. In the Bible, James
describes a special prayer ceremony that involves the laying of
hands on a person who is ill. This is a specific calling upon God, an
earnest pleading for his power to be made manifest in the sick person. When I asked Carole if she wanted the church to intercede for
her in this way, she wrote: