Although to be clear, I hope I never find out.
I've heard it said that if God could really heal people, there would be someone walking around with a formerly amputated limb that had grown back. After all, the argument goes, an all-powerful God could do that as easily as curing a disease.
Plus, that kind of miracle is more definitive. That is, its easy for a faith healer to pretend to heal someone who wasn't really sick, or for the placebo effect to cause people to feel better by the power of suggestion. An amputated leg growing back? That can't faked.
I believe that prayer has real power, but I don't have a fully satisfying answer to why healing doesn't ever seem to work that way. Maybe it would be too obvious if the case for God's intervention in human affairs could be placed on a "Before and After" poster.
Maybe God would rather be mysterious, and doesn't deal in verifiable miracles for the same reason God doesn't produce a weekly Heavenly Podcast giving us updates on life on the other side.
Of course, if God wanted to change the Heavenly M.O. and create a poster child for miracles, I would be glad to volunteer. I just don't spend much time getting my hopes up on that front. I get the feeling that God would rather work through me despite (or maybe because of) my limitations rather than just get rid of them. That sounds more like the God I know.
In the same way, I'd rather others pray for my well-being than my healing. And something about the other prayer just seems wrong.
Back when it was in question, God didn't answer my desperate prayers that I not have MS. It wouldn't be kind of rude for God to now answer yours on my behalf. It would be like God playing favorites. (But I'd still happily take it, of course.)
Seriously, though, I made peace with my MS before I was even diagnosed.
After I went blind in one eye, I had an 8-day period where the doctors weren't sure what was wrong with me. I spent much of that time praying that I would be diagnosed with Lyme Disease or Lupus, something that was (perhaps equally?) awful but at least, based on my initial research, appeared more treatable and predictable.
God didn't answer that prayer, at least not in the way I wanted. Instead, the day before I was diagnosed, God let me know I had MS, but that it was going to be ok.
I had a neurologist appointment on the afternoon of November 4, and I remember freaking out over the idea that I might be diagnosed with MS to the point that I was unsure if I could get in the car and drive to go to it. My blood pressure was so high at the doctor's office they had to re-take it three times before I calmed down enough that they would even proceed with the appointment.
When the doctor told me my first MRI was inconclusive and she wasn't ready to diagnose me, I felt the weight of the world lift off my shoulders. I had gotten a reprieve from a life sentence.
But the more I researched over the next six days, the more it sounded like what I had was MS. I did a spinal MRI in the meantime to check for any signs of the disease there, and as I was driving home the night before my follow-up for the results, I got a sign of another kind.
I was flipping through the radio stations, and as I pulled into my house I heard the chorus of an old hymn. It was the same song--"I Surrender All"--that played when I became a member of a church for the first time as an adult, and it played again the next time I did so in a different city. It played the Sunday after I got engaged. It even played at a different church the Sunday before my brother got cancer, and the Sunday after I got the job offer to move to California.
We had my niece sing it at our wedding 14 years ago because it always seemed to pop up at big moments in our lives, and the trend has continued. I've never heard it play at church once in my adult life without some other life-altering event attached.
It always feels like it is God's message that I'm not doing this life alone.
It's an old song, one that doesn't play on the kind of radio stations that I listen to, but its chorus had been worked into the chorus of a more contemporary release I happened to flip past. When I heard it, I started crying.
In that moment, I knew then that my prayers to avoid MS weren't going to be answered, but that God wanted me to know I hadn't been left alone.
For whatever reason, MS was part of the plan for me.
So today, I pray for a cure for everyone. I pray for a slow progression. I might even pray for a certain symptom to subside. But I don't ever pray to be magically healed.
God and I already had that conversation, and I respect its outcome.
The next day, I sat calmly as the doctor told me I had MS. Unlike six days before, this time the diagnosis felt ok.
I didn't avoid the disease as I had hoped, and I haven't been cured as others have prayed, but maybe I got something better.
I got a message repeated that I wasn't in this battle alone.
And so far, that's been enough of a miracle to keep me going.
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