Praying for strangers (part 2)

Only hours after I posted “Praying for strangers” last night, someone wrote a comment to let me know that there were issues with the veracity of the emailed request I quoted. My heart sank. I hate forwarded emails that take advantage of people’s willingness to believe what their friends send them. Usually I check them out at snopes.com, and sometimes reply back to the sender with what I found out.

This time I didn’t. Perhaps because I was thinking more about the larger issue of praying for strangers. Perhaps because it just didn’t press my “this sounds bogus” button. At any rate, this morning I did check snopes.com, and their explanation is not quite so simple as “True” or “False.” It actually is marked “True,” because in June 2001, Gary Hogman did send out an email requesting prayer for his wife Cindy, who was battling cancer. As of February 2002, her cancer was in remission, and when the snopes.com article was written up in November 2006, she remained cancer-free.

The email I received, however, had added a few (untrue) details as it spent the years making the rounds of cyberspace. Unlike other variations, it at least got the last name spelled correctly. But it falsely placed Gary Hogman in Iraq, and naturally gave the impression that Cindy’s cancer was a current event.

So what happens to the (possibly millions of) prayers made on the Hogmans’ behalf in response to an email that has taken on a life of its own? Were my prayers yesterday “wasted”? After all, what point is there to praying for healing of a cancer that is already in remission?

One of the articles I read yesterday reflected on how God is outside time, and does not need our requests to be chronologically prior to His answer. Sometimes someone has requested I pray for an event taking place at a certain time, such as a job interview or surgery. I get busy, and forget to pray at the designated time. When I remember later, I pray, but I wonder if it can affect the outcome that has already happened, even though I don’t know what it was.

I have been taught that yes, such prayers can make a difference, because God knows those prayers that will be said in the future and can respond to them just as well as to those said in the past. So could my prayer yesterday have helped Cindy back in 2001, when I had never heard of her? I don’t see why not. The whole logic of the role our prayers play in God’s purposes is beyond our understanding. Adding the issue of timing really doesn’t really change it all that much.

Still, this incident reminds me why I generally respond most to requests that are closer to me, because I know the people involved. There’s nothing wrong with praying for hard-to-verify emailed requests. But our energies are better devoted to those whose lives we can touch personally, not only with our prayers but also with more tangible acts of love.

Praying for strangers

This morning I received an email [12/4/2009 See today's post regarding the veracity of this email], forwarded several times already, and asking that I forward it on also. It is a request for prayer, from a soldier serving in Iraq, for his wife to be healed of stage 4 cervical cancer. Here is his request:

My name is Gary Hogman. Some of you receiving this know me, some do not. My wife, Cindy, is 32 years old and has just been diagnosed with stage 4 cervical cancer and her chances for survival are very slim. She was pregnant with our second child and had miscarried recently at 3 months, and now we know why. This is a request for you to forward this e-mail to everyone you know asking for prayer. The more people that pray for her to be healed, the better. Pray and forward. It only takes a second to hit ‘forward’. Please do it and don’t delete this, your prayer can, and perhaps will, save her life. Please pray and ask everyone you know to pray for the HEALING of Cindy and the removal of all cancer in her body, so she may enjoy all that life has to offer, and to continue to be the wonderful mother to our 5-year-old son Michael. The power of Prayer is unsurpassed. I want the whole world to have her in their prayers the next few weeks. God will hear our cry.

I do not normally forward emails from people I do not know, even when they have been forwarded to me by people I do know (as this was). I suppose in part it is distaste for the widespread practice of forwarding all sorts of stuff to everyone in your address book, whether they are likely to be interested or not. Part of it is that I cannot verify the contents of such emails – I do not want to try to figure out which are legitimate ones worthy of being passed along and which are not, and I would rather forward none of them than all of them.

I also shy away from asking total strangers to pray for me, and I am not comfortable with receiving such requests from strangers. I don’t mind praying for strangers, but I was taught somewhere (I can’t recall where, exactly) that one of the first prayers to make is asking what/whom to pray for, and that I need not add every prayer request I hear to my prayer list. God leads us to pray for those people and situations that are closest to us (that closeness may be geographic, emotional, or one’s sphere of influence to assist practically in meeting the need). He may lead us to pray for strangers, but the mere awareness of such a request does not constitute God’s leading to pray for it.

Getting ready for Christmas (part 1)

You wouldn’t know it from the Baptist church I attend, but today is the first Sunday of Advent. As a child, I thought of Advent as a time to light Advent candles, sing Christmas carols, make paper chains and popcorn chains for the tree, and put up the Nativity scenes. It was a time of preparation, but mostly doing fun things in preparation for more fun things. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned about Advent being a time of spiritual preparation.

Past years I have tried to do a family Advent devotional using an Advent wreath I had made (for our first Christmas together, twenty years ago). As the boys get older (and less excited by the simple act of lighting candles and blowing them out) and my husband’s work schedule has made family get-togethers infrequent, we’ve gotten away from it. This year I decided to try something different.

Al loves to play games, and he is always wanting a new game to play. (Today we made a “Christmasland” game, modeled after Candyland, with red and green squares, plus some special squares showing items such as ornaments, a nutcracker, a candle, etc.) So I talked about Advent being a time of getting ready, and how we get ready in different ways for things. He gets ready for school by getting dressed and eating breakfast, and he gets ready for a test by studying. If we go on a trip, we get ready by packing.

So if you were going on a trip somewhere for Christmas, what would you put in your suitcase to make sure that you had a wonderful Christmas?

I said I would pack

• a camera, to take pictures of people and the wonderful times we would have
• a Bible, so we could read the Christmas story
• a songbook of Christmas carols
• a warm jacket, hat, and mittens so we could go Christmas caroling

Al said we would need to take gifts to give to each other and to other people, and we would want to be sure we had food to eat (he suggested apples and bread).

Note that these need to be items that can actually be put in a suitcase. It might be handy to be able to pack sufficient patience to deal with the people and situations that often cause stress during the holidays, but patience isn’t pack-able – you only get it as you use it. Besides, I’ll deal with character traits later in Advent.

So what would you pack?

Who put the genie in the lamp?

This morning during breakfast, my son Al asked me, “Where did the idea of genies come from?” I have no idea what brought the question on, as I don’t remember they’re having been part of our conversation up to that point. I was tempted to answer that the origins of legends are almost by definition unknown, and that at most we can say what part of the world they come from. But I don’t think he meant the “where” geographically.

I could also have given an abstract answer about how people have come up with fanciful stories to explain things they don’t understand. But that wouldn’t really answer his question either. He wanted to know where the idea of the genie, specifically, came from.

So I decided to see what I could find out to answer his question. Just how did people come up with the idea of powerful beings with no more substance than smoke, who were kept in lamps and granted wishes when they were released? I’ve read a fair amount of mythology, but mostly that of European origins. Genies, as any kid who has watched Disney’s Aladdin can tell you, come from Arabia.

The word genie is the English equivalent of the Arabic jinn (or djinn). According to wikipedia, it came by way of the French translation of Arabian Nights, where the French word génie (from the Latin word genius for a guardian spirit assigned to each person at birth) was considered a particularly apt transliteration of the Arabic. Most of our ideas about genies came from the stories in Arabian Nights (and modern stories building on those literary foundations), especially the story of Aladdin. Oddly enough, this story was not in the Arabic version, and was added by the French translator, who had heard it from an Arab Syrian storyteller from Aleppo.

Give Water for Christmas

I’m going to start my Christmas shopping tomorrow. I don’t know yet what I’ll get my family, but I want to give someone in Africa some water. Ten years’ worth of water – clean water that will give life instead of disease and death.

There are a lot of charities competing for donations, all the more so these days with the rough economy, and some people who used to be donors now having to be on the receiving side instead. I try to pick one or two organizations to give to, ones that I’m sure are doing good work with the money entrusted to them. In the past I’ve given mostly to Heifer International, and I still think they’re doing great work.

But I recently learned about Water for Christmas. I happen to know the woman who started it, because we go to the same church. As a matter of fact she’s married to one of the pastors, and I’ve taught three of her sons in the K/1 class (not all at the same time - there’s a year or two between each one). So when the website says that 100% of the money I give goes directly to providing clean water in Africa, I believe it.

You can read her story here, and find out why she and her husband are so passionate about helping children in Africa. And if you’d like to get started with your Christmas shopping tomorrow, join in First Gift, a one day “viral campaign” to get as many people as we can to give $10 tomorrow, enough to give one person ten years’ worth of clean, life-giving water.

God’s Mighty Majesty

Yesterday the daily Bible reading I receive by email began with Psalm 93. “The Lord reigns; he is robed in majesty; the Lord is robed; he has put on strength as his belt.” A few lines later I read “Mightier than the thunders of many waters, mightier than the waves of the sea, the Lord on high is mighty!” That wasn’t the passage I had planned to use with Mighty Majesty (my notes had Psalm 145:12), but I decided the timing made it a good choice.

I found myself wondering, as I read the first two lines, why the phrase “he is robed” was repeated. From what I understand about Hebrew (purely secondhand, from my husband’s studies in seminary), repetition is used to emphasize a point. I can understand using such emphasis on the majesty of God, or His might. But why the emphasis on “he is robed”?

I suppose the best way to understand this would be to learn more about the Hebrew word translated as “robed” and its uses in various contexts. I might be able to figure out something using my husband’s interlinear Bible and Strong’s concordance. But while I can do that reasonably well with Greek words in the New Testament, I find it harder to deal with the Hebrew, where I keep forgetting I have to read from right to left.

In any case, I found myself thinking about the possible significance of the word without having done any word study on it. If this were about a human king being robed with majesty, I would think it might have to do with the exceptional beauty of his garments, or perhaps an oblique hint at the fact that under the robes he is like the rest of us, and it is the robes and the office they signify that set him apart, rather than his own inherent qualities.

But of course with God it is quite the opposite. It is God’s own inherent qualities that set Him apart from us, and any reference to robes is purely metaphorical. To my ears, it sounds strange to emphasize the metaphor, rather than the real majesty with which God is metaphorically robed.

God is the Life-giving Lord

If you want a challenge, try defining the word life – without, of course, using the words live, living, or alive.

My husband sometimes tells about a teacher he had who told the class that fire was alive. After all, she pointed out, fire consumes fuel (eating), it grows, it moves, and it even reproduces (when one fire turns into multiple fires). Since they weren’t convinced, she challenged them to come up with a good explanation why she was wrong. I have to admit, I’d have trouble myself knowing quite how to go about forming the argument to refute her.

In case you’re having trouble coming up with a good definition of life, be assured that you are not alone. This article explains how difficult it is to formulate an adequate definition. If life is defined as something that can reproduce itself, sterile animals such as mules would not be considered living. If it is defined as a system that takes in energy to create order locally, crystals might be considered alive. And if it is defined as that which consumes energy to grow, move, or reproduce, fire could be considered living, as my husband’s teacher suggested.

Of course, that’s just trying to define biological life. God gives us not only physical life but also spiritual life. Any ideas on how to define that?

Both kinds of life are a lot easier to describe, or give examples of, than to define. And that’s fine – I’d rather spend my time and energy living than figuring out how to define what it is I’m doing. And the kind of life I’d like to be living is the kind described by Jesus as “abundant life.” I’m afraid my life often doesn’t seem very abundant – unless you count the stacks of dishes and clothes waiting to be washed.

God is a Kind King

It was easy to pick the word “king” as a title for God. But picking an adjective to go with it was much harder. I thought of “kind” right away, but I was concerned that it’s too much like the word “nice” – a bit on the vague side, and more about being pleasant than righteous. God is certainly kind – there are dozens and dozens of Bible verses that say so. But in many people’s minds I think “kind” is somewhat akin to “soft.”

There are not a lot of good adjectives starting with K, however. I thought of knowing as a possibility. (I considered Knowing Keeper based on Psalm 121:4-5.) Kingly might work if I had a different noun. Knightly doesn’t really fit, even if the virtues that make a knight knightly also apply to God.

Of course, there’s no rule that I have to come up with an alliterative pair to describe God for every letter of the alphabet. I don’t intend to do Q or X, and so far I haven’t come up with any ideas for Y and I’m not doing well on Z. But the image of King is a very prominent one in Scripture, so I didn’t want to skip it.

Today I looked up the word kind to get an official definition.  ”Generous, good” – that certainly applies to God. So do some of the words supplied as synonyms of kind: benevolent, compassionate, gracious, loving. But would I call God amiable? Or congenial? I know I wouldn’t want to use indulgent or softhearted. And humane just doesn’t sound right.

But I also found out something else interesting, about the etymology of kind. It is related to Old English cynn, meaning “family,” which became our modern English kin. Kind meant having the feelings that relatives have for each other. Since God is our Father, we are His kin, in a sense. But is He kind to us as our Father, rather than as our King?

Then I checked out the etymology of king. And I discovered that it may also be related to the word cynn. If so, it originally meant a leader of a group of people who were related to each other (as tribal groups were). So a kind king was someone who led a group of people related to him and felt toward them as relatives do toward one another. (Though from reading history, one doesn’t get that impression of most kings, even in the days when they were more tribal chieftains than rulers of sovereign states.)

Human kings tend to become somewhat distanced from their subjects, and would consider very few of them as relatives. There is a far greater gap between us and God – yet He chooses to make us His children and treat us as family rather than just subjects under His rule. Of course, being “kind” doesn’t mean He is always “nice” – far from it. But considering how poorly we often follow the laws of His Kingdom, He is very patient – and kind – to us.

God is a Just Judge

When I did this (using the alphabet to come up with a list of words describing God) twenty-something years ago, I’m sure I didn’t wonder what it meant to say that God was just. Every church I have been part of since I was converted at age fourteen has clearly taught that justice means that God has to punish sin. We receive forgiveness only because the punishment we deserve was suffered by Jesus in our place.

This was a doctrine my mother hated. To her, that was the opposite of justice, for an innocent man to suffer in the place of the guilty, even if it was voluntary on his part. But she agreed that justice meant that people must bear the consequences of their mistakes. In this life, that meant one suffered the consequences of poor choices. After death, it meant reincarnation (or possibly transmigration) in order to continue working on problems left unresolved in the previous life.

I don’t remember ever hearing, until sometime in the past several years, the idea that justice might be seen in a significantly different way. At some point I read that the Hebrew notion of justice (what we see in the Old Testament) was not about punishment for wrongdoing so much as about wholeness, not just of the individual but of the entire community. Of course, there are a lot of different ideas out there when it comes to Bible interpretation, and I really didn’t know just how much validity this idea had.

I also read several books by Tony Hillerman, who wrote mysteries set (mostly) on a Navajo reservation. In Sacred Clowns, Navajo Tribal Police detective Jim Chee explains the Navajo concept of justice. In an interview before the book was released, Hillerman discusses the issue himself:

For example, the murderer in this new book has apologized anonymously, and, because traditional Navahos attach no value on vengeance beyond restitution, there is no real need to solve the murder. The Navaho way assumes the person who committed the crime is out of harmony and needs a ceremonial cure. It’s this contrast between justice and harmony that holds my attention as a writer.

Our Intimate Intercessor

In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will. (Romans 8:26-27)

I may not be able to find a verse in the Bible that uses the word “intimate” in relation to God, but I don’t know a better description of it than “he who searches our hearts” who also knows the mind and will of God. How much more intimate can one be than to know someone’s heart?

Science fiction stories that deal with telepathy often bring up interesting issues with regard to people know other people’s thoughts. What would it be like to know someone else’s deepest thoughts? What would it be like for someone else to know every thought that goes through my mind? I remember one story where such knowledge led to greater understanding, but most of us would greatly fear having another person know us that well.

With God, though, it’s a comfort rather than a fear. If there were a choice on our part, of course, I don’t know whether we would choose to let God know everything about us. But since He does, and extends His love to us anyway, it is a comfort to be known intimately and loved.

And it is a comfort to know that our prayers are somehow “translated” from our stumbling and fumbling attempts to what they should be according to God’s will. I know my prayers are often pretty pathetic, but they are transformed by our Intimate Intercessor into something infinitely better.