Last summer brought my circle of friends and family to our knees. Most every place we found ourselves became a prayer closet. At one point, a massive, summer wildfire bore down on Holden Village, a Lutheran retreat center in Washington’s Cascade Mountains. Thousands of us who hold that place sacred watched anxiously from afar. In e-mails and social media, friends of Holden pleaded for prayers, and recipients complied.
During that same time, cancer threatened my family from multiple directions. Friends and loved ones responded with kindness, compassion, and encouragement. Most everyone said, “We will pray for you.” My family and I have offered abundant thanks for all that praying and feel buoyed up just thinking about it.
I can’t help wondering, however, about the details and unspoken assumptions implicit in all those prayers, including my own. How exactly does one pray about cancer? Do we ask for miracles, hoping that God will somehow make cancer cells suddenly cease acting like cancer cells? Do we pray, even if only to cover our bases, that God would provide special guidance to the efforts of oncologists and surgeons?
