On Prayer and Miracles

Back before I got into this Torah and Messiah faith, I was a big Christian and a church-goin’ kid. My family, both parents having come out of Catholicism, were very much involved in Protestant and Evangelical Christianity. (Back then, my dad didn’t know of his biological parents nor his Jewish grandparents. More importantly, we were largely ignorant of God’s commandments back then!)

We’d attend multiple services on Sunday: early service, lazy man’s 11:00am service, and the night service. Wednesday service. Conferences with all the big Christian leaders. Bible study in church. Vacation Bible School. I did all that. And almost all my relatives were big on the church thing, too, so it ran in the family.

During that time, I was exposed to some stuff that had some long ranging affects on faith life. One thing in particular is prayer.

Let me tell you a fun little story. I was about 12 or 13, playing in a basketball league at the local YMCA. During pre-game practice, I got one of those splitting headaches, the kind that FRIGGIN’ HURTS. Borderline migraine. My grandma, God bless her, pulled me aside in front of the whole team, laid hands on me and prayed for me, saying, “Judah, I’ll pray and you tell me when it’s gone.” Embarrassed and perturbed, I didn’t know what to do or make of this.

She prayed for like half an hour.

The headache didn’t go away.

“It’s gone.” I said, lying to her. As a kid, you don’t know what else to do when standing there for 30 minutes while your kid friends stare at you like a crazy person. I played the whole game enduring a splitting headache, not saying a word in order that grandma be none-the-wiser.

In another instance, during the pre-teen years, my family was visiting some big Protestant Church. I was in Sunday school. The teachers had each kid come up and ask for prayer for something personal. Mine was some illness at the time; a cold or something trivial. It doesn’t matter what it was. They prayed “until it went away”. It didn’t go away.

These and other instances of prayer left a bad impression on me. I think they’d leave a bad impression on anybody who believed in God! Maybe God didn’t do miracles anymore, I thought. “How come it can’t be like in the Bible?” I thought to myself. You know, back in the good old days of religion, when God regularly intervened and everyone saw His power. (I was an early-blooming Grandpa Tevye!)

Then as you grow older and dumber, you start to wonder, “Maybe those things in the Bible never happened at all; maybe they’re just exaggerated stories! Who knows? It doesn’t work now, that’s for sure.”

To top it off, I soon discovered a lot of things we do in prayer are just rituals. Despite the Protestants being all hardcore Sola Absurdum, despite their looking down upon all forms of ritual, there’s actually no real Scriptural mandate for most of what we do in prayer. Folding hands, joining hands, bowing heads, saying “amen”, saying, “In Jesus’ name”, closing eyes, praying that God would bless the food, and so on. That’s all ritual, zero Scriptural support for them. Some of that became meaningless and mundane to me, and I promptly dropped some of those things when I moved out of my parent’s house. (Shh! To this day, I still don’t pray a blessing over the meal!)

There was only 1 redeeming thing about prayer in my life. My dad would pray over us kids every night before bed, praying with full meaning and earnestness. That affected me positively. I really believe that his prayers kept me under God’s directing. Without it – being purely honest here – I’d probably be an agnostic today.

Fast forward a few years.

About a month ago, one Messianic leader and friend told me how prayer had “transformed his life”.

Oiy!

When religious people start talking about transformations, they might as well be speaking religious Esperanto; I totally tune out. I’ve seen too many “transformations” that weren’t real. Call me jaded, but I just don’t believe you. Maybe you think you had a transformation, but you’re still the same person.

Well, this religious friend sent me, on his dime, some teachings on prayer. Since he’s a friend, I listened to them. I tried it out. I started praying. Regularly. I started praying without demanding anything. I came to God in prayer, mostly just giving thanks. Praying started out with giving-of-thanks. Praise. Like worship music, but with just the lyrics. No demands. I prayed for other people, too. Yes, some asking, but mostly just praise.

What happened?

Well, I didn’t get healed of physical illness. I didn’t miraculously receive gold fillings.

 

No healing miracles happened. Nothing I could point you to and say, “See! Goes does exist after all!”

Things did, however, start to change. Some good things. Some transformative things have happened in my life and in the lives of the people I was praying for…

Gosh, I hate to sound like that. If you’re anything like me, you read that last part and mentally skipped over it. But in honesty, my life with God is changing, transforming, because I started praying like this regularly. I pray in the morning. In the afternoon, I stop work and pray in private. I sometimes pray at night.

But what can I say? Prayer is changing my life with God. I actually talk to God, regularly, rather than just talk about him on this blog or just on shabbat during Bible study. It’s changing my life – less sin, believe it or not. That’s a good thing.

Why less sin? I don’t know. I think communicating directly with God does something to you. Puts your mind in the right place. Maybe it puts your flesh down. I don’t know. But it works. God’s plowing through my problems like a bulldozer on an ant hill.

And I’ve seen 2 people affected by my prayers. Not in some airy spiritual way either; but in a real way that showed up in the real world.

I’ve been praying regularly for 1 month and I’ve seen these real, actual good things happen. 1 month! Man. What is going to happen in 1 year? In 5 years? Think of the stuff you can change by praying earnestly for a lifetime? I think this stuff works, just not always in the way we expect it to.

I haven’t been healed of physical sickness; there was no undeniable God-manifestation, no bare arm of the Lord coming out of heaven. Maybe that won’t happen. Maybe it will. I have no idea now, actually. Before I was almost certain such things weren’t possible, seeing them fail so many times when I was younger. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe God still does heal people. I know for sure he doesn’t heal everybody. I know for sure that he doesn’t even heal all the people that love Him, as unfair as that seems.

But prayer affects things. I’m convinced of it.

One thing I want to start doing is praying for people that have totally and utterly abandoned God. I mean, the gone-gone people. Guys like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, guys that are so far removed from God, they’re convinced in their own minds God doesn’t exist and actively combat people deluded by the God spell. And for the people that despise us because we believe in God. To them, we’re just simpletons and fools who fell for the 3000 year old myths of Semitic tribesmen. I’m going to pray for these long-lost folks. Who knows what God will do? It’d sure as heck take a miracle for some of these people to turn to the Lord!

And I want to start praying for God’s Kingdom to show up. I mean, Messiah coming here and reigning as king. Restoring Israel. Settings things straight. Vindicating God’s people. Making his hidden kingdom be very visible in front of everybody. All those doubters shown wrong, all those haters put in their place. I want that to happen.

Most of all, I want to stand in a station of prayer in giving thanks and praising God. I think it’s one of the reasons we exist as humans, to give thanks to the God that formed us.

I want to start praying for the big stuff. Maybe they’ll happen. Maybe they’re not part of God’s plan, maybe they won’t happen. But prayer affects things. If you’d just STOP your busy life for one darn minute and just talk to God, things will change. So won’t you join me?