The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!” He replied, “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it will obey you.”
—LUKE 17:5–6
I did not write this weekend. Though one might wonder whether the gap between the dates of this entry and the last is the result of a relapse, it is not. I rode the wagon this weekend, difficult though it was.
My thirst for liquor is burning less by the day. I’ve found a secret to overcoming the anxious desire. I’ve prayed the Jesus Prayer time and again—Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Sometimes I add some additional content: I cannot control my thirst; fill me with better desires. These prayers have become a constant anchor, and I find that it is working some kind of good magic in me.
Magic?
This seems an offensive word to the modern Christian. After all, many a heretic found himself in dire straits attempting to conjure the miracles of Jesus like a mad magician. Many a preacher has crushed the faith of children in the attempt to make asthma or cancer into a grand disappearing act, Jesus’ name invoked like a magic word. Don’t those ask-and-receive, health-and-wealth sorts practice a type of Jesus magic? Maybe.
Perhaps magic is not the right word. Perhaps I’m dealing, instead, in mystery.
Yes, I feel the working of prayer, the way it is communion with the original Natural Force, the Force who gave birth to all forces and holds all things together (Col. 1:16–17). I feel the prayer drawing me to peace, producing something of a miracle. If this could be described as anything other than holy mystery, it’d have to be called conversion or healing, and I’ve not given myself to these words yet.
Healing is such a difficult concept.
Today, I visited my therapist, and he asked whether I’ve turned in to the pain.
“Yes,” I told him, “it’s been a regular carnival of unicorns and cotton candy.”
He did not laugh. “What have you found?”
I explained the way all things seem to connect when I explore the darker places in my heart, how all tributaries run to a particular and single source. My anemic self, my structured dogmas and disbelief in the healing power of God over my son—it all goes back to the faith healer, to the powerless anointing olive oil he purchased from the Piggly Wiggly.
“Good,” he said, “tell me how you feel about that.”
I considered it, and my stomach turned. I ran short of breath. I felt untethered, dangled over a great pit by the hand of a god who is either capricious or not there. This, of course, I could not articulate, and instead I said, “When I think about the faith healer, I can’t breathe; there’s fire, an empty feeling.”
“Okay. What else?”
I could not bring myself to admit the feeling of abandonment, but it was there. I considered this sense of God abandonment. What if I never normalize this sense, or what if I do—what if I come to the conclusion there is no God? Worse yet, what if I conclude there is a God, but that he doesn’t meet me in my dark places?
I gathered the courage to say what I mean to my therapist, and it’s this: there have been two times that I’ve offered specific requests for God’s healing. Once, I was a child with faith bigger than a mountain, and I asked God to move what I considered to be a mustard seed. Once, I was a father with faltering, flailing faith like a mustard seed, and I begged God to move what seemed to be a mountain. On both occasions, I might as well have saved the breath with which my prayers were uttered.
This thought is terrifying.
This evening, I am reflecting on the prayers of a father. Before I gave up the ghost on the business of prayer for Titus, I prayed like a good father would. I prayed like Jairus, the synagogue official in the Gospels who came to Jesus. “Heal my daughter,” he said, but along the way, Jesus was sidetracked by a hemorrhaging woman who reached out in unclean faith to touch the hem of Jesus’ robe. The woman was healed the instant she grasped the hemline, and Jesus, sensing the healing moment, stopped. “Who touched my robe?” he asked. “I felt the power of God going out from me, healing someone with grand faith.”
I imagine Jairus. “Yes, yes,” he may have been saying, “but let’s get on with it. We have precious little time.” Perhaps he wondered whether Jesus’ healing power had been spent on the bleeding woman. Maybe he questioned Jesus’ ability to conjure two miracles in a day. And as fate or divine providence would have it, in the moment that Jesus stopped to heal the woman, Jairus’s daughter passed. A house servant approached, told the men that the little girl had been taken to the underworld. “Don’t worry,” Jesus said, “she is just asleep. Let’s go” (Luke 8).
I think of Jairus, how he took Jesus’ words at face value, without regard for his servant’s grim news. Was he a man of great faith? I reckon him to be. It is this kind of man who trusts a doctor even after death has overtaken life.
In the days leading up to Titus’s stint at Arkansas Children’s Hospital, I prayed a great “come by here” prayer, asked for a healing miracle. My petitions lifted hollow, smelled like nothing in God’s throne room. They were unnoticeable, dull, and lackluster. Perhaps my faith was too small? Perhaps I was not righteous enough?
At six months old, Titus stopped growing. Then, he began shrinking in on himself until he was nothing more than a skeleton, however vivacious a skeleton he was. He began throwing up meals; his stools were gritty and undigested. I turned deeper into prayer, gathered with good saints on Thursday morning to petition the healer of Jairus’s daughter.
In July, we checked into Arkansas Children’s Hospital. I prayed harder. I prayed and prayed until I could pray no more. And when I reckoned Jesus had been sidetracked by some other son or daughter needing a miracle, some bleeding woman somewhere, I did the same thing I perceived God was doing: I turned my back and walked away.
I remember the mornings at Children’s Hospital. There, Titus and I stood at the fifth-floor window, on a walk down the hall, watching the morning rush on the highway below. I hold this memory: his cheek framed by the feeding tube that runs up his nose and down into his intestines. His brown eyes are so large, so absorbing, against the rest of his diminutive frame, and he flashes them at a woman who gawks from the nearby nurses’ station before he turns back to the broad window. Titus is unaware that he is the spectacle, and runs his finger back and forth against the glass as if to trace the path of the speeding cars. He laughs.
The gawker is a visitor, and she is loud-talking to a nurse who pores over charts.
“Ooh, he’s tiny,” she loud-whispers to the other. I turn and catch her squinting eyes. She straightens, smiles the awkward grin of one caught, and adds, “Cute too. How old is he?” she asks.
“He’ll be one on Saturday,” I answer.
“Lord!” she says, jumping backward into the nurses’ station. “That boy’s small!”
“I know. That’s sort of why we’re here.” Titus weighs about as much as a sixth-month-old, though he’s almost one year old.
The woman turns back to the nurse and begins to talk about her grandson. He’s big, she says. “Ninety-fifth percentile in height and weight. His mama was asking me the other day what ball we should use in his one-year portraits. She said, ‘Soccer?’ and I said, ‘Now, does he look like a soccer player to you? That boy’s gonna play football.’”
The woman continues her pronouncements of her grandson’s grandeur—his size, his intellect, his devilish good looks. It’s an exercise in compare and contrast, though I doubt she even realizes it. The nurse has turned her attention to her charts, offers intermittent m-hmms as she thumbs pages one after another.
I take hold of the pole to which Titus’s IV, feeding pump, feeding bag, and tube are attached, and walk back toward our room. “Bye, honey,” the woman says, oblivious to the sting of her words.
My phone rings, and though I do not recognize the number, I answer. Perhaps I’m looking for a diversion to my sudden anger, but I will not get it.
It is a churchman, who says, “I’d like to share a bit of hope with you.” He shares the story of his own sick son, how he was also once wasting away. He shares how God provided miraculous salvation by way of faith.
He pauses, says, “God orchestrated everything to achieve his ultimate glory. God will bring you an answer in good time because you are a man of faith.”
He means all the hope in the world, but I feel gut punched. He’s wrong. I am not a man of faith these days. I’ve converted to a fraud. I’ve given up on prayer.
It is then that I realize I am speaking to a ghost, the ghost of the faith healer haunting through a well-meaning churchman. These words are a scourge.
Haven’t I been faithful?
Haven’t I at least done right?
If Titus passes, what does that say about faith, about my faith? What does that say about God?
The man on the line tells me to “hang on, keep faith in God. He is Titus’s healer.”
But I don’t want to hang on. I’d kill for a sign, for a miracle doctor, for something to confirm I’m not walking alone.
“Sure. Thanks for calling,” I say.
You see? I am a fraud.
In the days following, others will call, tell me that God ordained this moment in his sovereignty to bring himself glory. Their theology is painful. I cannot see my son as a pawn in God’s grand glory-hoarding scheme. It is too much.
There is little comfort in the well-meaning smog of men’s words. There’s no vindication in their volume.
Ghosts haunt and haunt. The faith healer, the unwise word-wielders (oh, friends of Job!)—they visit me in the hospital. “With the faith of a mustard seed,” one says, and another says, “This is all predestined for God’s glory.” The ghosts of faith healing and systematized theology all converge in that sanitized, suffocating space.
Our ghosts always seem to surface at the most inopportune times, don’t they?
This is why I call my sister, who lives only a few miles from the hospital in Little Rock. This is why she smuggles in my medicine of choice.
“Even Jesus asked God why he was forsaken.”
This is what my therapist tells me. Today, I feel forsaken. I feel abandoned within the hull of hollow faith, a hull haunted by ghosts, and without an escape hatch. But the therapist keeps telling me to turn in to this darkness.
“This is your cave,” he said, “the interior place meant for you and God. You feel the darkness there? Go. He promises he’ll go with you.”
He didn’t stop there.
“When you go into the dark places of your own soul, write how you feel. Describe the emotions, the sensations. And when you feel that there is no God, when you ask why he’s forsaken you, don’t be ashamed. Remember what I said about Jesus, how even he asked?”
This evening, I still feel lost, abandoned, left for dead or drinking, and I cannot decide which is worse. All my hinges feel caddywampus. I still feel that prayer is powerless, that it is an exercise in emptiness. I still feel alone.
“Even Jesus”—this is quite the pairing of words. Jesus asked why he’d been forsaken, but I’d never heard this from either the faith healer or the good Southern Baptist lot. I hear these words now, and somehow they are a comfort.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Please do not leave me or forsake me.