January 6, 1999

Where is faith when healing doesn't come?
___By Mark Wingfield
___Managing Editor
___If prayer makes the kind of difference in health that so many scientific studies seem to be showing, why doesn't everyone who prays get healed?
___It's a question that caused a crisis of faith for Sarah Zimmerman. Five years ago, her best friend contracted HIV, the virus that leads to AIDS.
___All her life, her father had done everything he could to meet her needs, and that had shaped her view of God as her heavenly Father, she said. "If my dad could have fixed this, he would. God could but didn't. How could that possibly be the reaction of a loving Father?"
___Zimmer-man, a journalist based in Atlanta, had met George several years earlier when they both lived in Oklahoma City and attended the same church. They developed a strong friendship that continued after each moved to new locations for jobs.
___They talked on the phone every Saturday morning at 10. One week, George had a sinus infection. The

Sarah Zimmerman with her friend, George.

next week he still had it. Finally, he called on a Monday night, which she knew was a sign of either really good news or really bad news.
___In this case it was really bad.
___She walked with him through a couple of years of failing health. She prayed for God to reveal a cure for AIDS in time to help her friend. She prayed for him to survive against the odds.
___But George eventually died anyway.
___Through this experience, which coincided with traumatic challenges in her own job, Zimmerman began to question God's role as a "loving Father."
___"Why worship a God who claims to be the Great Physician but evidently isn't making house calls?" she asked. "I believed he existed but didn't believe he could possibly be involved in the details of my life in a loving way."
___Such real-life questions trouble many sincere Christians, acknowledged Tommy Lea, dean of the theology school at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth. Lea has first-hand experience with such questions, because he currently is engaged in a life-and-death battle with prostate cancer that has spread to other parts of his body.
___Her recalls that 25 years ago his wife suffered a serious eye problem that left her blind temporarily. Christians prayed for her recovery, and she was healed. Now he has cancer, and Christians are praying again, but he has not been fully healed.
___Lea confesses he doesn't know why the outcomes of the two diseases tackled by prayer are different.
___But that doesn't diminish his faith in God or his desire for people to pray for his health, he said.
___"The evidence of the presence of sickness in Scripture despite prayer and believing companions ... is so obvious that you just can't take prayer as a guarantee of healing and getting rid of all your problems," Lea said. "I do not see anywhere in Scripture a promise that all people who pray real hard in faith are going to be healed."
___Even the Apostle Paul wasn't spared of disease and affliction, Lea noted. "He wasn't completely snatched out of it, but he seems to have received by prayer an ability to face the trouble and keep going."
___Instead of viewing prayer as a cure-all, Christians should realize prayer provides many other benefits in accordance with God's care, he suggested.
___"I'm feeling comfortable in realizing that the prayers people are praying for me are giving me strength, health, stamina and endurance. But I don't have any conviction that they're going to bring me healing. If God chooses to do that, I'd be pleased. ... God may not take the thorn away, but he will give us grace. Prayer becomes the means to receiving that grace."
___Faith, Lea said, is "the confidence in God to meet your needs."
___He and others cite hope as a vital ingredient for health and survival. Without hope, humans die.
___Yet everyone--and especially those facing health crises--has moments of anguish and deep discouragement, Lea said. "If you get stuck in these, you'll have a difficult experience ahead."
___The way out of this pit of discouragement is not searching for God's assurance that complete physical healing will come, he suggested. Rather, it is finding God's grace to face whatever comes.
___"Sometimes we just have to learn to live with it," he concluded.
___That's where Zimmerman eventually came out as well. For her, it was an epiphany centering in a nearly audible word from God. While playing one night with her two young nieces, she said, God asked her this question: "If it were possible for either Karen or Kimberly to die to make George well, would you let it happen?"
___Zimmerman said she thought about it for a minute, finally having to acknowledge to God that no, she wouldn't do that. "He said: 'You wouldn't let one of your twin nieces die for your best friend. I let my only son die for you while you were still my enemy, and you're questioning my love for you?"
___The next Sunday, her church observed the Lord's Supper. The words of Scripture hit her like a brick: "This is my body, broken for you."
___She got the point, she said, but still struggled to understand God's love. Finally, one Sunday afternoon she went to the prayer cottage at Second Ponce de Leon Baptist Church in Atlanta and found herself yelling at God.
___"God, if your grace is so amazing, prove it," she said. "If you love me like a father, then pick me up and carry me. I don't see a detour, so God, pick me up. You have to carry me through this."
___Then came a knock on the door. A good friend from church stepped in. "I saw your car in the parking lot and thought you needed a hug," the friend said.
___And that began the journey to her own healing, she said. "Through her, God began to show me that he was going to carry me. He surrounded me with friends who let me confess my heartache and listen to my stories and pray for me and George. And God showed me that carrying me was what he wanted all along."
___Understanding the connection between faith and health, Zimmerman said, involves learning the lesson of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego when they faced the fiery furnace: "God, I believe you are able to save me from this, but if you do not, I know you still love me. I trust that you are faithful. I believe you'll carry me through this. And I will choose to worship you."

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