We've been asked to pray for those who are suffering in Haiti and those who have gone to their aid. People have been praying for a member of our parish who is a Haitian student living in Lawrence. A mother came by the office yesterday to place her daughter's name on the prayer list because she has gone to Haiti to help out in the relief effort.
Do our prayers really help?
The following message from former Presiding Bishop Ed Browning speaks to this question.
"Almighty God, you have promised to hear the petitions of those who ask in your Son's Name…" (For the answering of prayer, BCP p. 834)
Some researcher somewhere has determined that people who pray, or who have people praying for them, have such-and-such better chance of recovery from gallstones than people who don't. Good. I often pray that sick people will get well.
But I also pray for many people who don't get better. If my prayers do not turn these things into the releases and healings for which I long, does that mean they've failed? Does it mean I didn't pray right? Didn't pray hard enough? Only if the narrow test of immediate historical change is the only test of prayer's efficacy. If the only useful prayer is a prayer that works right here and right now, in just the way I want it to work, we're in trouble.
Prayer is not a way to get around human sorrow, a special incantation that produces a desired result God would otherwise withhold from us. It is a thread of holy energy that binds us together. It enables the communion of my soul with the souls of others, whether I know them or not. "I could feel myself lifted by all the prayers," someone will often tell me after a serious illness. Get enough of these holy threads wrapped around a person, and she will feel them, quite apart from the issue of whether or not she gets what she wants.
– From A Year of Days with the Book of Common Prayer by Bishop Edmond Lee Browning.
May God use our prayers as a "thread of holy energy that binds us together" with one another and all those for whom we offer prayers!