Villagersonline : blogs : Mike_Wise : Did I not pray liud enough?

From: Mike_Wise
Date: Wed Apr  6 16:44:06 EDT 2011
Subject: Did I not pray liud enough?

Responses
Mike_Wise: No Subject (4/6/11)

Karen: Jesus is takes the blame. . . .and grieves with you. . .and still is your friend (4/7/11)

Karen: Typo(id) fever. . . (4/7/11)
Mike_Wise: Thanks so much (4/7/11)

Responses (sorted by date)
Mike_Wise: Thanks so much (4/7/11)
Karen: Typo(id) fever. . . (4/7/11)
Karen: Jesus is takes the blame. . . .and grieves with you. . .and still is your friend (4/7/11)
Mike_Wise: No Subject (4/6/11)

[This is something I wrote on my personal blog, but I wanted to share it with all of you in the hopes that maybe my words could help you find comfort as we walk through this together. I love you all so much]
Last night, we gathered at our church, The Village, to begin a process of saying goodbye to our friend Sean. For a little over a month Sean has been fighting a battle against stage 4 stomach cancer. Cancer does what it tends to usually do and Sean left this world for the next at noon on Monday.
My church is a small mission church. We have around 90 or so people that regularly attend. This is a blessing, and a curse, and a blessing again. It’s a blessing because we are small enough that everyone knows everyone and we become like family. It becomes a curse when something like this happens. When someone dies it kills us all right along with them. But then it’s a blessing again cause we can lean on each other and help each other through it. There is no place I would rather be then at this church.
I was having a conversation with someone last night, his name is Russ. We’ve started to become pretty good friends, he and his wife Emily are really awesome authentic people. Russ with his ling beard and geekiness and Emily who is not afraid to dance when she worships and has the most amazing soprano singing voice. Last night Russ and I were talking and I had a chance to share some of my story with him. In particular what struck me about this exchange is that Russ was unafraid to ask questions that no one ever asks. He wanted to know what led to my becoming an agnostic, how that changed when I became a Christian.
Because so much of my walk of faith is tied into what happened to my brother that subject came up. I’ve touched on it briefly on this blog, my brother was an epileptic and he also had a very strong faith in God. When he was a teenager he always prayed for a miracle, that he could be cured. When that never took, and as his faith became richer, more mature, he began to seek that God would use him and his disability to minister to others with handicaps. To help them to see that God could use them, and nothing could hold them back. And then he died in a car crash on Aug 27th 2001, he wasn’t found until the next morning.
Now I had already began having doubts about my faith, questions about doctrine and theology, things that I didn’t feel added up with God’s character. I remember some wonderful conversations that I had with Mark about these subjects. But when Mark died, I began to unravel. I wanted nothing more than to feel numb and I wanted nothing at all to do with God.
At that point, in order to believe in God I knew that I would have to believe in one of two things. First perhaps God was powerless to stop what happened to my brother. Because God so believes in not messing with our so called free will it would not allow him to step in and not allow the car crash to happen. Or 2 that the car crash was God’s plan all along. Either one of those choices to me were devastating and I could not wrap my head around either one of them at all. It was so much easier, so much more comfortable, to not believe in a God at all, so that is the direction that I went.
That’s when Russ asked the really tough but amazing question, it’s one that many people don’t even think of to ask. He asked me, now that I believe, how I look at the reality of my brothers death. Do I accept that God new about it and refused to change it? Or even worse that it was his plan all along? What a beautifully uncomfortable question. I gave it some thought and this is what I said
I said that I honestly wasn’t sure, that much about me hasn’t changed. In fact in many ways it would be safe to say that I am still very much an agnosstic. That has become such a dirty word to Christians and it shouldn’t be. All being an agnostic means is that you just don’t know. The difference between where I was then and where I am now is not that I know anymore, but that I trust God. So I don’t know, but I trust that God, who is greater than me does know. And when the time comes for all to be revealed I’ll know then.
I also don’t know, from my limited human perspective, that my brother’s life would have turned out any better if he hadn’t died in that car wreck, which was something I really didn’t have the wherewithal to explore when I was going through the grief of losing him. Perhaps his passing in such a quick manner was a blessing to him. Maybe if he had lived the epilepsy would have gotten worse. Perhaps he would have suffered more. Who’s to say. It’s all speculation, but I do know that Mark did have a hard life, and it very well could have become much worse.
I used to say I was a devout agnostic. I used to tell people my motto was I don’t know what the hell is going on, and neither do you! I still think there is some truth in that. Perhaps I am a Christian Agnostic after all, which doesn’t mean that I don’t believe, it just means that I admit that despite my faith there is so much that I am unsure of. I’m just a human being and my perspective suffers because of that. But no matter how much I doubt I trust God all the more. My belief in God does NOT suffer because of my doubt. In fact it is safe to say that my faith is strengthened by it.
This world is so heartbreaking. We all have trials and troubles, we all suffer, we feel pain, we get sick and eventually each and every one of us will have to experience death. In the midst of our pain and our suffering we ask for healing, and when it doesn’t come in the way that we think it should we begin to ask tough question. Did I not believe enough? Did I not pray loud enough? I found myself asking that question yesterday while thinking about my friend Sean’s passing. We all stood together and we prayed on behalf of our friend Sean that he would be healed. That he would be set free of all this suffering and hurt.
Who’s to say that our prayers were not answered?
This blog post is dedicated to Samantha Bloom

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From: Mike_Wise
Date: Wed Apr  6 16:58:44 EDT 2011
Subject:

Ugh :( Typo in the title which I can't fix

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From: Karen
Date: Wed Apr  6 23:15:10 EDT 2011
Subject: Jesus is takes the blame. . . .and grieves with you. . .and still is your friend

John 11:21 “Lord,” Martha said to Jesus, “if you had been here, my brother would not have died. 22 But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask.”
23 Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.”
24 Martha answered, “I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.”
25 Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; 26 and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?”
27 “Yes, Lord,” she replied, “I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, who is to come into the world.”
28 After she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary aside. “The Teacher is here,” she said, “and is asking for you.” 29 When Mary heard this, she got up quickly and went to him. 30 Now Jesus had not yet entered the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him. 31 When the Jews who had been with Mary in the house, comforting her, noticed how quickly she got up and went out, they followed her, supposing she was going to the tomb to mourn there.
32 When Mary reached the place where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
33 When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. 34 “Where have you laid him?” he asked.
“Come and see, Lord,” they replied.
35 Jesus wept.
36 Then the Jews said, “See how he loved him!”
37 But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”
I have been thinking about this passage many times in the last couple of weeks. Nothing challenges our trust in the goodness and power of our Lord Jesus, more than the brutality of suffering, the nauseatingly, achingly brutal death of cancer. You and I both know that Sean's death from cancer and your brother's death due to an epileptic seizure aren't from their poor choices ("free will"). It's a terribly broken world. Why doesn't God fix it now? Mary and Martha both ask the questions we all want to ask: Jesus, why weren't you here? It's because you weren't here that this happened.
It's OK to ask him that. His good friends Mary and Martha asked him that. Rather than get defensive and angry, he cried with them! Knowing that he would raise Lazarus from the dead, he still cried with them!!!
The ugliness of death wasn't meant to be. I struggle all the time with why God allows it, miraculously "fixing" some things but not everything.
I read an interesting book several years ago in which the writer observed that Lazarus, having been raised from the dead once, would have died another natural death again, later on. That's a weird thought, isn't it? It's like Lazarus's resurrection was a "sneak preview" of the coming attraction. But it wasn't the SHOW. We're still waiting for that. Waiting, and waiting, and waiting.
In the days before Sean's death, I asked God to send my beloved Grandma Mary to Sean to cheer him on, help him along...she too suffered a brutal death from abdominal cancer, over ten years ago. I still haven't "gotten over" the pain of losing her this way. And Jesus is my good friend every time I think of her and cry.

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From: Karen
Date: Thu Apr  7 00:48:01 EDT 2011
Subject: Typo(id) fever. . .

I made one too. Hmmm.
Maybe "liud" is the mysterious element that we fear (incorrectly) is missing from our supposedly unanswered prayers. (as in, Did I not pray....I don't know how...enough)
P.S. Mike, my grandma died the same week your brother did. Maybe they bumped into each other in the "meet and greet" section??

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From: Mike_Wise
Date: Thu Apr  7 11:56:11 EDT 2011
Subject: Thanks so much

Karen, thank you so much for your response, I too believe that God is bigger than our questions, that he can take them all and I also believe that someday we will "know fully as we are fully known" and at some point, after we leave here, it will all be explained to us. I like the idea of it happening while sitting with Jesus and maybe we are telling him our story. Not because he doesn't know it already but there is something wonderful in the sharing of your own story. And Jesus would interject every now and again and say "well you see, when that was going on here's what you didn't know....
I can't wait for that day.

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