Tuesday 5 December 2006

In the midst of life


A colleague writes today that their teenage son who is fighting for his life after intrusive medical treatment, bone marrow transplant, tissue rejection, all sorts of horrible reaction....I could go on but it is all too horrible for them...says now that "He had been doing a lot of thinking and he told us that he knows that he is dying. He has made the decision to not be put on life support and while we will maintain active treatment, it will only be a matter of time before his body finally cannot go on fighting this disease."
I have said in reply to them that I am sorry that the only thing I can do is pray hard and often, and yet I also know that this is the best thing I can do.
Without going into the ins and outs of it, or teezing out any of the subtleties of what this is all about; can those of you know how to pray (and perhaps even some of you who don't) : pray for Chris, for Steve and Judy his parents and Michael his brother.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have been visiting Temple Square in Salt Lake City, and in response to that overt marketing organisation which is the LDS, and its seductive message, I have had to think carefully about what I believe. If anything, this encounter with my Mormon friends may have made me more orthodox in my view of Jesus and (perhaps ungenerously) even less inclined to consider them as fellow "Christians".

At the same time, my father lies dying in a hospice in the north eastern suburbs of Adelaide, with perhaps a month left, perhaps less, perhaps more.

And I feel so useless as my father dies, and as I hear of a brilliant and brave teenager face death as only the young can. But if I'm dinkum in my thoughts about this Jesus, then (a) the promise of the resurrection cannot be lost on me and on any of us and (2) our strongest weapon in all things must be the privilege of prayer.

So I pray blindly at times, not asking for anything specific but simply that the Lord bless us and keep us. Often I'm stuck for words, so I pray the Our Father, I pray the blessing for my father and for everyone who is being tried, and often now I pray Psalm 51 as I realise my own inadequacies and errors.

And more and more I am realising that this is the strongest tool that we have been given. Ins and outs may be unnecessary. Prayer is a tool, a way of placing our problems and our trials on Jesus, of bringing our problems to him and asking him to fix it as only he knows how.

Prayer is perhaps the best thing that this knowledge of Jesus has brought to me.

Chris, Steve, Judy and Michael: The LORD bless you and keep you. The LORD make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. The LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.

Stephan Clark said...

yes prayer is complex and brings out, I suspect, the bext in us