Thoughts And Prayers

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The only reason you’re alive right now is because I prayed for you. Don’t stop reading; I know how that sounds. I’m not sure how this is supposed to work, but I’ve been agonizing over this for weeks now and I’ve had enough. Take it or leave it, what happened happened, and maybe you can do something that I couldn’t.

    Three months ago, I was living the American Dream. I had a job, a house, a car, and without fanfare, it came crashing down around me.
    That day was like any other. I woke up at 6AM, took the dog out, grabbed some coffee, and left for work.
    Barbara, a coworker, was going around the office like she usually did, but on this day instead of her usual small-talk, she was deathly serious. Her father had cancer, they had discovered it too late, and there wasn’t much time. She asked me to pray for him, and I said that I would.
    You know how it is though, if you live anywhere with even a small faith community, you’ll hear a lot about thoughts and prayers, and it’s just second nature to say that yeah, you’ll pray for whatever. But do you always pray for someone when you say that you will? I sure didn’t. If there was a God, I was ok with him, I was a good guy. I didn’t have any need.
    Would you judge me if I told you that the next week, when Barbara let us know that her dad had died, I didn’t bat an eye or feel bad for neglecting to pray? They knew how bad he was doing, they knew there was no hope. What was a prayer supposed to do?
    I offered my condolences. That was that. I didn’t know Barbara well enough to offer much else.
    A few weeks later, my buddy Ted had a similar story to tell. His mom had been fighting breast cancer for a long while, but it was just getting worse. Faced with this reality, Ted, the most stoic anti-establishment atheist that I knew was breaking down and asking everyone, including me, to pray for her.
    I’d never tell him this, but the writing was on the wall. There was absolutely nothing that could be done. I said I’d pray though, but I forgot.
    His mom died the next day. Of course. I didn’t see much of Ted after that, frankly, I wouldn’t have known what to say even if I had.

    The defining moment of my life came unexpectedly, and I didn’t even recognize it.

    I arrived home late from work, and there were folks gathering on the lawn next door. I went over to see. Hit and run with a cyclist, and the kid was bleeding out on the side of the road. Someone ran past me with towels and dropped one. I picked it up, and this guy thought I was offering to help treat the wound. It’s not really a good look to rescind such an offer, even if it was made in error, so I knelt down and applied pressure where I was told to.
    “Where the hell is the ambulance?” I thought as I debated if checking my watch would be impolite.
    Bleeding man spoke up.
    “Excuse me?”  And before I could lean in, he grabbed my shirt and pulled me towards him.
    “Pray, please. Pray.”
    It didn’t matter that he had pulled me close, everyone could hear him. He let go of me and fell back, and it was all eyes on me to see how I responded.
    Maybe it was the kid dying before me, or maybe the fear of looking like a prick in front of my neighbors, but I prayed. And I prayed good.

    I prayed for the kid to live. I prayed for the kid to be healed. Then, sensing that my neighbors were kind of getting into it, I added in some bit about his best days being ahead of him and that “this too, will pass.” It was a pretty good act, considering how this kid was going to die in a few minutes.
    Except he didn’t..
    The EMT finally showed up, and they were beside themselves. The bleeding had stopped, and the kid was, as they put it, “in miraculous shape for someone who’d lost so much blood.”
    They wheeled him off, but before they loaded him into the back of the ambulance, I heard him thank me. My neighbors started slapping my back and shaking my hand and telling me how good of a guy I was. I had just done what came naturally.  

    I saw the kid after he got out of the hospital, back on his bike within a week like nothing had happened. He stopped me before I could get in my car, and thanked me again for my “kind words” and that he just knew that God had spoken through me. He said it was a wake-up call for him, and that he was going to live a better life. I just smiled and shook his hand and wondered what a shrink would make of it.

    What happened next was unavoidable I suppose. Word had gotten around that I was a “miracle man” and now, instead of folks asking for my prayers offhand when someone they knew was sick, I was getting requests day and night from everyone I knew. There were big requests, the illnesses and whatnot, but then there were the small requests. Someone’s back hurt, someone was getting stressed by their workload, just menial stuff. I tried to be nice about it, these folks believed in something, and I didn’t want to get in the way of it. So I said I’d pray. 

As you’ve probably guessed, I didn’t keep my word.

    I regret that now.

    The illnesses took a bad turn, one after another. By the end of the first week, every single one of the family members I had been asked to pray for had died. The small requests? The back pain became slipped discs and hospitalizations. The heavy workloads became suicide attempts and psychiatric commitals.

It didn’t dawn on me what was happening until Barbara caught me after work one day. She had been pretty quiet since her father died, but she had another request to make of me. Her mother this time. She had had a stroke and it didn’t look like she was going to regain consciousness. Would I pray for her? Of course, I said.

“Will you pray for her right now?” Barbara asked.

I was taken aback. I hadn’t been put on the spot like this since the kid on the bike. “Sure,” I said. It was all I could do.

I prayed for Barbara, and I prayed for her mother. Then, because I had found my momentum, I decided to pray for the other folks, at least the ones who weren’t dead yet. It was a half-hearted affair, but I tried to put on a good show for Barbara. She thanked me, and left.

Barbara’s mom regained consciousness that day. I won’t ever be able to confirm it, but I think it was at about the same time that I was praying for her. What’s more, all of the folks that I had prayed for, some of them in the hospital with some pretty serious injuries at this point—they all made rapid, “miraculous” recoveries. Word got around once more that I had prayed for healing, and healing had come. And so the requests continued.

I’ll admit, I was curious now, so I began to test the waters a bit. When I received a prayer request, I’d write it down. Then, I would take the full list of requests for the day and choose which ones to pray for at random. Look, I know how this sounds, but the ones that I chose to pray for resulted in recoveries, breakthroughs, and lives changing for the good. The ones I didn’t pray for, well, exactly the opposite.

What is a person supposed to do in this kind of situation? Everyone, every single day, has problems that need to be solved. Everyone, every single day, has a prayer that they need to have answered. And now, everyone began to catch on that maybe I wasn’t praying for everyone like I’d said I would, because folks could tell quite clearly that some of the people I was “praying for” were getting better, and some weren’t. I’ll be honest, it was an ego thing more than anything else, but I stepped up and started to pray for everyone on the list.

And they all got better.

Have you ever heard a call for prayers while watching an interview on the news? I’ll bet you don’t pay them much attention, I never did. That is, until I realized that if I heard someone call for prayers, no matter what the source was, if I didn’t pray, then something bad would happen. It was a bit of a nuisance, but I started to feel a real sense of responsibility if someone died because I hadn’t prayed for them. Then things escalated.

It got to the point that I didn’t need to hear a specific call for prayer; if I even knew of a situation, I had to pray for it. If I did, things were fine.

If not…

I stopped watching TV, but inevitably someone would mention something at work and the guilt came back. Just hearing about disasters second-hand was enough for me to be responsible.

Then Barbara dropped dead one night. Freak cardiac event, completely unexpected.
Ted overdosed on sleeping pills the next night.
My elderly mother fell down some stairs and broke her neck.
All in the span of a week.

Did I bear responsibility? Should I have been praying for them all along?

I wasn’t prepared to take that risk. I started spending hours in prayer each day for everyone I knew. Then I heard of some kids in the neighborhood dying because their porch collapsed. I just started going through the phone book. Difficult? Sure, but I had to do it. One forgotten name meant death for some innocent person.

I contemplated what would happen if I “forgot” to pray for someone that I hated. Their deaths were never as cathartic as I would have hoped.

I started hearing news from out of state: whole towns washed away by floods, body counts in earthquakes, mass shootings. I tried to not feel guilty.
Tried, because if I found a specific name somewhere, the stories of death became ones of “miraculous lone survivors.” They were always the people that I prayed for.

    It spread across the nation. I stopped going to work and answering my phone. My days were spent searching online phone books and databases, praying feverishly so that nobody would die because of me. At a certain point, I quit sleeping. This has become my life.

    I heard the news today though. Car bombings in the middle-east. Mass genocide and plague outbreaks. It’s gone global, and I’m afraid I cannot go on like this any longer.

    So now you know, and may God help you.

    You’re alive because I prayed for the reader of this letter. I don’t know what the rules are exactly, but here you are, so I must have done something right.

    Tell them what happened. Tell the world. Maybe it’ll stop somehow, maybe other people will get this ability to alter the course of nature so nothing like this ever happens again.

    If not, please forgive me. I’m not sure how long the world will last without me.