My husband died in 2016. Later that same year, a Christian movie called Miracles from Heaven was released. It was supposed to be an inspiring story of faith and restoration based on true events and my closest friends, thinking that seeing it would refresh my sad heart, convinced me to go. It didn't work.
I should have known that it wouldn't when I saw the theater vestibule full of women fingering tissues, anticipating the tears they expected would come. They may have found a measure of joy in weeping, but I did not. My weeping came all too easily and from a more intimate core. But for my friends' sake, I stayed and watched the movie. It was worse than I expected.
Its centerpiece was the against-all-odds rescue of a daughter from illness and accident, a rescue that resulted in the renewal of her mother's faith in God. For almost everyone there, this was supposed to be a happy ending. Not for me.
If there is such a thing as prayer abuse, this is it.
First, from my point of view at the time, it was easy to see the woman's answer to prayer as a betrayal. Sure, her daughter was healed, but overwhelmingly, desperately sick people do not get healed; they die. Dead people do not rise; they stay dead. I knew this from personal experience. As these women wept for joy and hope for someone they never knew, my husband stayed dead. That, of course, is the selfish view.
More generally, though, prayer - any prayer that asks for God to manipulate circumstances He put in motion - works against itself. If we ask God (an attitude that dares to suppose we know something is needed and He doesn't) for something in our material world to change, it might happen, but whether it does or not, all we'll get is a change in our material world. Our spiritual world will not enlarge, it will shrink.
That is why the gate to God is narrow.
Prayer for healing, prayer for relief from suffering, prayer for happiness and ease, prayer for good fortune, prayer for safety and peace - they demonstrate lack of confidence that God knows what He is doing. Almost all prayer operates from a place of broad, shallow faith. Letting God have His way and knowing it is the best way, even when (maybe especially when) it results in something unpleasant, drives faith narrow and deep. It is the faith of the one who does not see, but still believes.
We rarely remember that this whole life adventure only ends one way. We all die sooner or later. Delaying that or assuming we know better than God when that is supposed to happen negates the faith we say we have in Him.
I would have liked to ask the moviemakers about the nature of this mother's faith. Would she have had it if her daughter died? If her faith was based on her daughter's rescue, it is small indeed.
The same principles apply to determining whether we have circumstance-based faith or whether our faith is based on knowing the real presence of God, the God who lives and makes His temple in our very bodies, who tells us we will never be free difficulty and suffering while we live but that He makes Himself available through it all.
The goal is worship God because we believe no matter what, not to believe because we worship God for all the good He has brought.
This is how we figure out who we are. Once we realize that God truly does reside in us by His own design, what happens in our lives becomes a kind of partnership. God does what He does and we trust Him to do it. God is not apart from us, changing the world around us because we plead with Him like child next to the candy rack in the checkout line.
There are those that say prayer changes us, but what we really want is for it to change the circumstances around us. Trust, the knowledge that the best is already happening, supersedes prayer and then we become more what we are meant to be.
