Chapter 26
Good Monday Morning to this week 26 of 2022
How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day?
Psalm 13:1-2
Following is a passage out of a journal of S. Lee visitting the boarder to the Ukraine a few weeks ago.
When prayer is more a rasp out in gasps.
One refugee I met, broke down as he recalled his horrible year even before the war. His firstborn daughter was born with a permanently damaged brain due to a botched delivery. Sometimes she suffered more than 300 seizures a day, and D. and his wife had spent sleepless nights trying to keep their little baby alive. Because of their child’s condition, evacuating Ukraine was near-impossible, even as shelling and bombing rattled their home. Through the help of others, they were at able to flee to Warsaw.
D. didn’t quote verses about God working all things for the good or testify about finding purpose in his sufferings, which have not ended. He recounted the past year with hollow eyes: “We lived life as though already dead.”
But D. too, has an expression of faith—a real, living one. He continues to pray. He doesn’t pray “leap of faith” prayers declaring healing over his daughter; his lips burned through miracle-seeking prayers long ago. And yet, he prays. There is a name he calls out to, even if his prayers aren’t red-hot passionate or peppered with statements of profound conviction and Bible passages. He prays because, he explains simply, “I can’t imagine any other way of living.” His faith isn’t anchored in mission, in purpose, or in the miraculous. It is more like breathing, even when those breaths sometimes rasp out in gasps.
Wishing God to hear our breathing, our prayers and our rasp out in gasps.
Philemon