Comedian Steven Wright notes: “There’s a fine line between fishing and standing on a shore like an idiot.” I find myself walking a similarly fine line these days. It’s navigating the tension between what I know God can do about the cancer in my brain and what I expect God to do about it. Every meeting with doctors seems to confirm the same harsh reality, the same all-too-short timeline ahead. But I believe that God controls every cell in my body (I am fond of RC Sproul’s line that there’s not a single ‘maverick molecule’ running loose in the cosmos, a truth I especially feel when my pending diagnosis depends on the presence or absence of countable molecules with names I can’t remember). And I confess with the author of Psalm 139: Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them. Think on that – every one of my days was written in God’s book. There is no diagnosis that has the power to erase or remove one of those pages. I also believe the words of Ephesians 3:20, which tell me that God “is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think.”

     So here I stand, convinced I have an unerasable number of days ordained by a God who is able to work miracles.  And that fine line exists somewhere between those convictions and the humble recognition that simply because God can heal in miraculous ways does not always mean that he will do so in every case. After all, the same apostle who wrote in Ephesians of God’s ability to exceed our expectations is the one who prayed earnestly and repeatedly for his own affliction to be removed (see 2 Corinthians 12:7-10) and received only this assurance from the Lord: My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.

     So are we foolish to pray for healing? Do we not pray for amazing things because “God will do what he will do”? Not at all.  It is because God will do what he will do that we pray with confidence and expectation, trusting his character, his power, and his perfect plan.  A plan that somehow uses us and our prayers to make things happen.  God, in his wisdom, has chosen to use “means” to accomplish his will. He uses the water cycle to produce crops, he uses the moon’s gravitational pull to produce tides, he uses human preaching to convict and convert sinners, and he uses prayer to carry out his purposes. God does not need us to accomplish his will, but, well… Thomas Aquinas says it better than I ever could:  For we are fellow workers with God. His own power is sufficient, but he uses intermediate causes so as to maintain order and beauty in things and to share with creatures the dignity of being causes.

     So I pray. And my family prays. And my church prays. And people I’ve known and cared about over the years pray. And strangers who’ve never met me pray. And we pray that God will do something amazing and unexpected. That he will do “far more abundantly than all that we ask or think.”  

     But we pray knowing that we can never force his hand. In his wisdom, I may only have a few pages left in his book (that is always true for any of us, but I’m confronted with it more starkly now). In the end, the doctors may be right. I pray they are not. I want them to be gobsmacked. But if they are proven right, then all our time spent praying was not wasted. We were never standing on the shore looking like idiots. Because in prayer we confess God’s control over our circumstances and we declare his power over all things and we lean into his trustworthiness to handle things that are beyond us and we affirm his love for his children that invites them to draw near and to unburden their hearts.

     His only answer for me may be like what he gave Paul – my grace is sufficient for you. I have deeply felt that sufficiency every day since I entered the ER three short weeks ago. But I know he can do more. Already, we've seen prayers answered in how quickly I recovered from brain surgery and regained my physical and cognitive functions.  I also consider his answer to Hezekiah in Isaiah 38:1-5 and pray that I, too, may have another 15 years added to my life. But however God answers our prayers, he is good, he is wise, and he is mighty; and he has given me all that I need and more than I deserve.  Prayers to such a God are never foolish.