the power of prayer

My friend Hilary has been out to visit me the past month (she's the one that has been guest blogging on the site) and she's been challenging me to improve my prayer life with the patients at the hospital.  One of the beauties I've found about practicing medicine here in Africa is that I feel less self-conscious when I'm spending time with my patients (maybe because I feel so much more self-conscious everywhere else....) and often feel free to share the gospel or pray with them and their families.  However, even though I pray for patients on my own, or in prayer meetings, or with the chaplains, I rarely do it with the patients themselves.  Part of me gets nervous for my patients when I pray with them -- what if they don't get better?  What will that do to their faith?  And part of me just plain gets nervous for myself -- what does it mean to take a public step of faith, in the middle of a whole ward, with other patients looking on; God's reputation, so to speak, at stake?  Can my faith survive another 'unanswered prayer'?   It's a test of the strength of my relationship with God to see if it can withstand months and months of heartfelt prayers that often seem to end up being answered with deformity, or disability, or even death in my patients.  Maybe it would be better just to ask for safe things -- God to 'bless them', or 'give them comfort', instead having the boldness to ask for what I really want to see happen -- my 7 year old patient Edward to wake up from his cerebral malaria coma and drink some water; my 16 year old patient Tom to get up from his mysterious paralysis and walk again, my 60 year old patient Vincent to fight off his drug resistant TB and go home after 120 days in the hospital.
Most of us have been faced with situations like that in our own lives -- the parent who died from cancer, the young person who died in a traffic accident, the young baby that died from SIDS -- and these things often test our faith.  It can be difficult to work in a hospital where those crises of faith happen every day, several times a day, as you watch the hope fade away from some of your patients and their families until they become resigned.  But Hilary reminded me that God's reputation is God's business, and it's not my job to pray the prayers and answer them too (a conundrum which sounds easy, but quickly becomes complicated when you're the doc caring for the patient that you're praying for).  This has been freeing for me to keep praying for patients on the wards, in the hallways, sitting on the fence outside -- wherever I find them, and let God take the circumstances and use them for himself as he sees fit.