When you spread out your hands in prayer, I will hide my eyes from you; even if you offer many prayers, I will not listen.
Your hands are full of blood; wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight! Stop doing wrong,
learn to do right! Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow. ~ Isaiah 1:15-17a.
When my mum got sick with brain cancer, people tried to pray it out of her. It didn’t work, not for eight years, and then all of a sudden the prayers must have kicked in, or she gained an extra ounce of faith or something, but suddenly she got better. I don’t know that I ever recovered from it though. People believing that my mum, a pastor’s wife, didn’t have enough faith.
And I wonder what it looks like to have enough faith. Does it look like the Pope? Does it look like Mother Teresa (who apparently doubted her beliefs consistently, in the face of such sorrow)? Does it look like a child?…
(this post is the first in a column i am writing over at Prodigal Magazine called Everyday Radical; i will be there every second tuesday; won’t you join me HERE for the rest of this story?)
**also, tomorrow evening, we will be launching imperfect prose on thursdays, 2013… the PROMPT for this week’s link-up is CREATE.**