Prayer is a powerful fact of life—and I use the word fact purposely.
We believers know that from personal experience.
If you have prayed for a healing miracle—if doctors have told you that you or someone you love has little or no chance to live, and then following prayer, you witness the awesome, intervening power of God to pull you or that person from the brink of death—you know that prayer is fact.
If you are at the edge of everything falling apart—you’re totally broke, all the cards are stacked against you, you’re flat on your face at the bottom, people don’t want to be around you, and bankruptcy or leaping from the nearest bridge seems to be the only answer—and then out of the blue, you get relief, or a fervent prayer has been answered—that is a factual experience in your life.
Of course, the world is full of doubters. If you are one of them, you just haven’t yet had the firsthand experience of so many believers. Someday you will be up against a wall like others in this chapter, and God will make Himself known to you at that time. Then and there, prayer will become a fact of life in your life.
And keep this in mind: God is a God of second chances.
“Hold on Mac . . . I’m not going to leave you!” shouted Gerry, the younger of the two men struggling to keep their heads above water.
“I’m cold . . . I don’t think I can hold on any longer,” shivered Mac, his lips blue from the cold December waters.
“Just keep hanging on to that stick!” shouted Gerry, trying desperately to believe his own words. “It’ll be light soon . . . somebody will see us.”
Gerry Ponson, his older friend, Mac Ansespy, and Mac’s black Labrador retriever had left shore at 5:00 AM to cross the three-mile bay near New Orleans to their favorite duck-hunting spot. The forecast had called for nasty weather, yet they thought if they got their seventeen-foot open-bay boat across early enough, they could make it. But reaching the center of the bay, the waters became increasingly choppy as a northwester charged suddenly into the channel and bore down upon them, tossing their craft like a toy.
When seawater splashed over them, Mac momentarily took his hands from the steering wheel to clean his glasses. In that instant, the rough waters seized the direction of the boat, causing it to be sideways in the waves.
“Turn the boat, turn the boat!” Gerry shouted, but it was too late. A huge wave crashed in on them, instantly filling their boat, causing it to sink in eight feet of water.
One of the few items in the craft that Gerry could grab was a ten-foot push pole used for pushing a boat through shallow waters. By plunging the stick into the mud and standing on the gunnels of the boat, they could just keep their heads above water. “Grab that pole, Mac, and hold on,” Gerry repeated to his friend.
In a quick assessment, Gerry knew Mac was in no shape to swim to shore. Besides, until the sun came up, they might be swimming in circles. He also considered leaving Mac and swimming for help. But even if he made it ashore, it was five miles to the nearest phone. And Mac couldn’t survive on his own. No . . . he’d wait . . . maybe a boat would come up the channel.
Alternately, Gerry would prop up Mac, then grab the dog by the collar and help him stay afloat for a few minutes. Finally, Gerry made a decision. He told the dog to go.
“Where’s Booga?” gasped Mac, disoriented after two hours in the water, looking for his champion black Lab.
“I tol’ him to git. I can save you, Mac, but I can’t save your dog.”
In his heart he knew the dog would never make it. A mile-and- a-half across the channel in those nasty waters would be too much for any creature.
Gerry’s constant movement was staving off hypothermia while Mac’s body temperature plunged dangerously low, causing a shutdown of body functions in the frigid waters and biting wind.
“I’m cold, Gerry . . . I can’t hold on any longer,” Mac panted, mentally letting go as well.
“Hold on, Mac. Somebody’ll come.”
Gerry didn’t really believe that.
He didn’t believe in anything. He’d been a heathen all his adult life. There were times as a kid when he sort of allowed that God existed, but as an adult he was a self-described “drinkin’, cheatin’ heathen, looking for love in all the wrong places.”
His sister had tried. She tried to talk to him about God, but he’d called her a fruitcake—and worse—told her to “get her blankety-blank outta his house.”
Smash!
A wave drenched him.
“Hold on, Mac!”
Maybe he should have listened to her. His girlfriend, Shannon, too . . . she was a believer. She didn’t press him like his sister had . . . gave him his space . . . but he knew she wished he’d come on board with the Lord.
“I can’t hold on anymore,” said Mac, weaker now.
Smash. Another wave.
“Yes, you can! Hold on,” encouraged Gerry, trying to buy his own baloney, but this was bad. Really bad. Inside his head he was saying, We’re gonna die out here. Nobody’s comin’ . . . we’re gonna die.
Gerry lifted his eyes toward the sky, unsure of how to say what he was going to say. “God . . . if you hear me . . . please, please send us a boat. Send us a boat, God. Please save us.”
His own words startled him . . . he couldn’t believe what he had just said.
Then—not two minutes later—he couldn’t believe what his eyes were seeing.
“Mac . . . I see something!”
Through the morning mist Gerry could see the shadows of a cross . . . the mast of a boat coming through the channel. Through the haze he started to make it out . . . a big boat . . . probably seventy-five feet long.
“They’ll see us, Mac. Hold on to me!” he shouted, pulling the push pole from the mud, attaching a shirt to one end, waving it frantically in the air.
“Over here!” he shouted repeatedly.
Doubtful thoughts rushed through his mind. Would they see them—just a blob in rough waters? Would somebody on that boat be looking off to the south, at just the right moment, to see somebody where they shouldn’t be, off in the distance waving a shirt on a pole?
“Make ’em see us, God!” shouted Gerry, now in-for-a-penny- in-for-a-pound with the Lord.
“Mac . . . I think they see us! They’ve stopped! But that big boat can’t get over here. It’s not deep enough.”
Then Gerry saw that someone had leaped from the boat and was swimming toward them.
“They’re coming, Mac, hold on.”
A man told Mac to lie on his back, and he’d pull him the hundred yards or so to the boat. On his own, Gerry began swimming to safety. It hadn’t dawned on him yet that within moments of asking for help from the Almighty, the boat actu- ally showed up. But the moment Gerry saw the name of the boat, it struck him—like a ton of bricks. He knew right then and there that God had heard his pleading prayer and had saved him.
The boat’s name was Second Chance.
On board the boat, he met the owners—a husband and wife. It was Karen who had spotted them, and her husband, Bimbo, who had jumped in to rescue Mac. They gave them some dry clothes and tried to get them warm. But Mac was not doing so well. He complained of chest pains.
As Karen and Bimbo comforted Mac, Gerry picked up the radio and quickly shouted “Mayday, Mayday!”
A voice cracked over the radio. It was the Coast Guard. They said to hold on. Soon a flapping sound indicated that a medevac chopper had arrived, and it was lowering a medic who would grasp Mac in a sling and pull him up.
It was an emergency. They couldn’t take the time to also lift Gerry into the chopper. But Bimbo and Karen let Gerry ashore at the earliest opportunity. Bimbo arranged for his brother to meet them and to give Gerry a lift to his pickup truck to drive to the hospital to check on Mac.
On the drive to the hospital, the power of what had happened that day raced through Gerry’s mind—the near-death tragedy and the miracle rescue. A flood of tears were triggered as Gerry pulled to the side of the road. He placed his head in his arms on the steering wheel and thanked the Almighty.
Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in.
—REVELATION 3:20 NCV
“Did you find Booga?” muttered Mac from his hospital bed.
Gerry sadly shook his head, knowing that the dog couldn’t have made it. But he promised his friend he would try to find Booga and give him a good burial.
“He’s a world-class champion,” uttered Mac.
“I know,” said Gerry, remembering how proudly Mac had announced that his black Labrador retriever, Booga, was voted third in the nation in his class.
Later that day, Gerry borrowed a boat to search the marshy shoreline for any sign of Booga even though he knew it was a hopeless task.
“Woof.”
“Booga! Is that you?”
Tears again welled up in Gerry’s eyes. He couldn’t believe that God was offering second chances twice in one day! There was Booga, just waiting to be rescued from the desolate marsh.
“‘Hey, where ya been?’ that’s what Booga was sayin’ to me,” smiled Gerry later.
Gerry Ponson experienced a major transformation in his life. It was emblazoned on his heart and mind that a boat named Second Chance had been delivered to him through prayer, just as he was giving up all hope. Gerry committed himself to serving his Maker for the rest of his life. He’s been a street preacher ever since.
Don’t try to convince Gerry that prayer is not “fact” . . . he knows differently!
Eleven days after he was lifted from those cold waters in the bay, Gerry made things right with Shannon. Wanting to start the new year with a clean slate, he asked her to marry him—on December 30th. After all, he’d already been given an incredible godwink—a second chance.
You call out to God for help and he helps—he’s a good Father that way.
—1 PETER 1:17 THE MESSAGE
Gerry came to realize that being seen through the haze by someone on that boat, in such rough waters, was not all of it— that boat was not even supposed to be there. Bimbo told Gerry that the impending storm had altered the tides, causing them to delay their crossing of the bay the night before. By all rights, they should have gone the long way into the Gulf of Mexico. What an even more spectacular wink from God that the boat named Second Chance showed up where it did!
EVIDENCE
Scientific studies to clinically confirm the efficacy of prayer have doubled in the past decade—encouraging news for those of us who have always known the power of prayer.
Dr. Mitchell Krucoff, a cardiologist at Duke University, randomly selected 150 heart patients and placed them into five groups for a pilot research project. One group received standard cardiac care. Three others received treatments from a bedside therapist described as imagery, stress relaxation, and touch therapy. A final group received distant “offsite intercessory prayer.”
Those in the prayer therapy group improved by more than 50 percent. “There may be a benefit to these therapies,” said Dr. Krucoff, cautiously optimistic. He has subsequently expanded the study to fifteen hundred patients.1
At St. Luke’s Hospital in Kansas City, cardiac researcher William Harris, PhD, also found positive results from a study of intercessory or distant prayer on one thousand heart patients with prior cardiac conditions of a serious nature. They were randomly assigned to two groups: Without knowing it, half received daily prayer for two weeks, half had no prayer. Those who received prayer fared 11 percent better.2
In a similar study, at San Francisco General Hospital in 1988, patients who received prayer were able to leave the hospital sooner.3
Dr. Harold Koenig, Duke’s associate professor of medicine and psychiatry, stated that some twelve hundred studies on the effects of prayer and health were conducted at such universities as Duke, Dartmouth, and Yale. These were some of the results published in his book Handbook of Religion and Health.4
Hospitalized people who attended church regularly had an average stay three times shorter than people who didn’t.
Heart patients who participated in religion were 14 percent more likely to live following surgery than those who didn’t.
The elderly who attended church regularly were 50 percent less likely to suffer strokes than those who didn’t go to church.
In Israel, religious people were 40 percent less likely to die from cardiovascular disease and cancer than those who weren’t religious.
Dr. Koenig was also quoted in USA Today as saying, “Healthy senior citizens who said they rarely or never prayed ran about a 50 percent greater risk of dying” from their cardiac condition.5
Have I made my point? The efficacy of prayer is fact
Janine leaned against the kitchen counter, sobbing quietly. Her boys were in the next room, and she didn’t want them to hear.
In a depressed daze, she kept opening and closing the refrigerator, then the cabinet doors, hoping to find something she’d somehow missed for the kids to eat. Nothing—not even a bag of rice.
Her ex-husband hadn’t sent a support check in two years. No use expecting anything from him. She was on her own.
It had been thirty days since Raytheon Aircraft laid her off, and she couldn’t think straight. She couldn’t find a solution to her problem. Couldn’t imagine how she could buy groceries or make the house payment before the next unemployment check would arrive.
The boys’ laughter rose from the den. How long would it be before they had nothing to laugh about, she wondered.
She was scared. With the downturn in the airline industry after September 11, 2001, she was just one of eleven thousand workers who’d lost aviation-related jobs in Wichita. Without special skills, she wouldn’t be on anyone’s list to rehire.
With a quiet sigh, Janine closed her eyes. Her lips moved ever so slightly with her prayer of desperation.
The doorbell rang—or tried to—giving off its annoying buzz. Something was wrong with it, but like the peeling paint on the house, the car that leaked oil, and the washing machine that filled only halfway, it was just one more unfixable problem way down her list of priorities.
Janine hastily wiped her reddened eyes with a damp paper towel and peered through the front door glass. She recognized the man on her front stoop. He wasn’t a friend, just an acquaintance from church. She hadn’t spoken to him in years.
Why was he here now, standing on her porch at five thirty in the evening?
“Hi, Steve,” Janine greeted, surprised that she’d remembered his first name. “Come on in.”
As he stepped into the hallway, he looked a bit surprised himself even to be there.
“Janine, you’ll never guess why I’m here. I hope you don’t think I’m crazy, but God wouldn’t let me go home tonight.”
Janine just looked at him.
“He wouldn’t let me go home until I wrote you a check.”
Janine’s mouth fell open. A check?
“All day long, you were on my mind,” he continued, “and God was telling me you needed a lift. Will you take this?” In his outstretched hand was a folded check.
Janine mutely looked at the check for $800, then back to Steve—stunned by his generosity and even more by God’s message to her.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
Her heart lifted, knowing she wasn’t so alone after all. Now she could buy groceries and even get the boys a treat.
“You don’t have to pay me back,” Steve said hastily. “It’s a gift, and I want you to call if you need more later.”
“Thank you,” she repeated, too choked up to speak, but this time with her face uplifted to God.
SOMEBODY KNOWS THE TROUBLE I’VE SEEN
I wonder how many readers have been in Janine’s situation: downsized, pummeled by unexpected trouble, or otherwise left in a state of despair, up against the proverbial wall, staring at a checking account that was incapable of paying the rent and putting food on the table.
In reviewing those dark times, was it your faith and the power of prayer that pulled you through?
By trade Mary Haise was an accountant. Numbers came easy for her.
Still, she was puzzled by one aspect of the church donor form. She got the part about tithing a certain amount to the church each week. Surely the church board needed to know how much they could expect she would commit over the course of the year. It was the little box at the bottom that was new to her. It said, “Check here to tithe unexpected income.”
The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.
—JAMES 5:16 KJV
Unexpected income?
Oh, she got it. If she won the lottery, she would commit to give the church its fair share . . . normally 10 percent.
Well, why not? she thought. If she were to come into a nice chunk of “unexpected” cash, why shouldn’t God get His fair share?
In a bold stroke, she placed a check mark in the little box. On her drive home, Mary began thinking about the prospects of “unexpected income.” How much, for instance. How much income would she like to have turn up on her doorstep?
If you expect the worst, you get the worst. And if you expect the best, you will get the best.6
—NORMAN VINCENT PEALE
How about fifty grand?
Yeah . . . fifty thousand dollars . . . that would be nice right about now, with the crunch her finances had been in lately. She could finally buy that condo she had been dreaming about as a retirement home.
Pulling into her driveway, Mary made a strong, affirmative statement.
“Okay God, I am asking you for fifty thousand dollars in ‘unexpected income.’”
Exactly three days later, Mary’s godwink arrived.
Ripping through her daily stack of mail, Mary opened a routine statement from her brokerage firm. Its contents shocked her.
“Oh!” she gasped, then audibly inhaling, stared wide-eyed at the statement.
The brokers reported that stock, which had been in her father’s will, previously worth only pennies, had suddenly exploded. The paper in front of her reported a value of $50,000.
Exactly.
Mary felt gratitude and euphoria the following Sunday when she wrote a check for $5000, fulfilling her 10 percent promise. She slipped it into the offering basket at church, laughing to herself as she wrote at the bottom, “tithing of unexpected income.”
But confirmation that God is truly the author of all blessings came during the service when Pastor Victoria Etchemendy announced that the church building fund was running short.
“We need an additional $5000 for our Sunday school space,” said Victoria, not yet aware of Mary’s envelope in the offering.
Perhaps it was Mary’s imagination, but that morning everything around her seemed to shine with an unusual brightness.
GOD IS ALWAYS LISTENING
I have found that God hears our prayers even if He doesn’t answer them in the way we expect or on our timetables. In Mary’s case, her prayer may have seemed like a whimsical request, but as she later described it, “I immediately felt a shift inside, almost a physical thing, that went really deep on a trust level.” God demonstrated that He was listening—that He really knew the desires of her heart.
Mary’s experience brings me back to something I wrote earlier—that once, even while I was complaining, God still listened and answered my prayer.
Though I have come to understand that, in most cases, prayer works best when we expect God to answer our prayers, following are two stories about the recipients of answered prayer who were actually surprised by the outcomes.
Betty and Andy sat on the couch, shoulder to shoulder, reminiscing over the decades as they turned the pages of the family photo album. Two of the oldest photographs dated from the 1940s—a young soldier, fresh-faced and sharply dressed, at a kitchen table next to a chubby, dimpled baby in a high chair. The next photo showed the baby boy on his rocking horse.
In the pages that followed, an older boy with the same dimpled chin smiled at the camera on trips to the lake, at picnics with cousins, and from behind glowing birthday cakes. The man in the uniform—the baby’s father—was no longer in any of those photos.
“Wouldn’t it be nice to know whatever happened to your dad?” Betty mused.
Andy didn’t answer.
Long ago, he’d put that question to rest. He’d assumed—or maybe he’d been told—that his real father was dead. Killed in a car accident. But he’d never heard the details, never seen the grave.
A nagging doubt persisted about his father. But when he asked his mother, she’d simply reply, “Don’t ask me.” So he stopped asking.
For almost sixty years, he tried not to think about his story. It was the story of his life, but with crucial pages ripped away.
Betty decided to pray about it. She clasped her hands and bowed her head.
“Dear God, help my husband learn the identity of his father.”
Twelve hundred miles away, an old man’s fingers picked up a curled photo and looked at his baby son. The edges of the photo were worn thin. For fifty-eight years, instead of holding his son, two photos were all he had to hold. Their stained and torn edges showed the love they’d received, poor substitutes for the child himself.
“Take a good look at this kid,” his wife Mildred had said sharply when she took their baby and slammed the door, back in 1946. “It’ll be the last time you ever see him.”
It was a wartime romance that ended when the war ended.
George Henderson didn’t believe her at first, thinking the threat was just angry words of a failed marriage. But she was right. He was never able to find her or his son after that. Eventually he moved back to his home state of Kansas.
George remarried later on and moved to Topeka, where he’d grown up. But he never stopped looking, wondering, wishing he could find his son.
“I wish I knew where Andy was,” he would say.
Relatives and friends pitched in from time to time with phone calls and Internet searches. One fruitless search after another.
One day in 2003, Topeka’s water clerk, Gloria Hollister, learned from a nephew that George had a long lost son—his only child—and heard about George’s futile search over the years.
Gloria had always liked George and enjoyed chatting with him when he came into City Hall to pay his water bill. She’d had some success tracing her own family history, so she decided to put her skills to work.
With the initial sleuthing, Gloria found that George’s child was still alive. His last name was no longer Henderson but Kellogg. Knowing that George’s first wife was originally from Nevada, she searched for “Kellogg” in that state.
Jackpot! Ten names downloaded onto her screen. Andy Kellogg, Las Vegas, Nevada, was the last name on the list.
Gloria excitedly called George’s nephew and told him that perhaps George’s son was alive. She gave him the phone number for Andy Kellogg.
But wasn’t it too late?
George’s wife and relatives were worried. Fifty-eight years had passed. George was eighty-seven. It was crazy to open up a Pandora’s box of potential ill feeling and anger. What if his son wanted nothing to do with him? George’s circle of friends and relatives cautioned: “He might say, ‘You’re a stranger. I don’t know you.’”
“I’ll accept that,” George said calmly.
A relative in Nevada made the first contact, dialing Andy Kellogg in Las Vegas. But the voice of this Andy was too young. It turned out to be Andy Kellogg’s son, also named Andy, who gladly provided his dad’s unlisted telephone number.
After hanging up, the younger Andy Kellogg called his father. “Dad, I’ve got a grandpa!” he shouted into the phone.
His father was perplexed. “What are you talking about?”
“Your dad is alive!”
Andy Kellogg hung up the phone in a daze, and looked over at Betty.
“Didn’t you just ask me, not two weeks ago, what had happened to my dad?”
She nodded. “I remember.”
“And prayed about it?”
She nodded again.
“Well, your prayer has been answered. He’s alive. He’s going to call me.”
A few days later, the call came, the tears flowed, and when George and Andy finally met in a tearful reunion at the Topeka Airport, father and son found their similarities bridged the decades with almost no effort on their parts.
Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.7
—JOHN UPDIKE
“It was like we had known each other a long time,” Andy said.
“When you wait that long, you just don’t think it’s going to happen,” George marveled.
Andy and Betty met dozens of family members, even some of the people whose names were listed in Andy’s baby book—people who’d given him gifts at his birth.
“I like this family. It’s just like we have known each other all our lives!” Andy marveled.
Thanks to a Godwink Link—the loving help offered by an astute and caring town clerk—a father and son were reunited after fifty-eight years, just two weeks after a wife’s prayer was lifted up to God.
At the Henderson and Kellogg homes are new photos in the family albums, the kinds that families cherish—photos of a father and son, arms wrapped around each other, beaming with love and contentment.
The air was still. The heat was stifling.
Bad enough that it was the fifth day of a mid-nineties heat wave; worse, it was also the fifth day of a power blackout.
The curtains in Denise Fouracres’s wide-open kitchen window hadn’t moved a millimeter. The fan on the table sat motionless, like a bad joke.
Mother of three boys and one on the way, Denise was at wit’s end.
Luke, her three-year-old, was unusually crabby, becoming more so each time he fruitlessly pushed the button on the nonworking fan.
“Popsicle, Mommy,” said Luke, wiping his eyes.
“Sorry, baby, Mommy doesn’t have any more popsicles. Everything is gone.”
“Kool-Aid.”
“Sorry, baby.”
“Water.”
Hugging her three-year-old while expelling a tired breath, Denise slowly shook her head.
God is the source of all energy. Energy in the universe, atomic energy, electrical energy, and spiritual energy. The Bible emphasizes this point: “He giveth power to the faint.”8
—NORMAN VINCENT PEALE
“I know baby . . . you’re thirsty and hot. But the power’s been out for five days and there’s no water and nothing in the fridge.”
Luke let out a frustrated whine.
In the small town north of Detroit, it was not unusual for a transformer to blow out. But five days? In this heat?
Another disgruntled sound emerged from Luke as he ineffectively and repeatedly struck the fan switch.
Denise sat down, lifted Luke to her lap, and said: “Let’s pray about it, Honey, let’s ask Jesus to help us.”
“Lord, we ask that you bring us relief . . . ”
“And turn the fan on!” chimed Luke.
At that very moment . . . the fan began slowly to turn. Gathering speed, a breeze lifted Luke’s hair as his eyes widened and his mouth dropped open.
“We should of asked Him yesterday!” exclaimed Luke.
Denise smiled and hugged him, almost startled by the other strange sounds—the TV coming on in the living room, the refrigerator humming, and of course, the rattling of a long dormant fan!
She was also pleased that this small godwink would give her child long-lasting evidence of the power from above. That was confirmed as little Luke dashed out the door to tell the news to his friend across the street where electric power had not yet been restored.
“All you have to do is ask Jesus,” she heard him advise the neighbor.
PRAYER WORKS
Repeating myself—I have learned that prayer works.
Time and time again Louise and I have found our prayers answered. In fact, I am hard pressed to think of a time they weren’t.
A dear aunt was given a 10 percent chance of survival. We and others prayed. Today, she’s the picture of good health.
Louise’s son, Dan, was hospitalized with a mysterious, life-threatening illness. We prayed. He’s totally well.
When our home was being built, the costs skyrocketed—twice the estimate. We were both without income sufficient to extend the construction loan, so we prayed. God answered with a phone call to Louise for a job that produced enough income to get back on track and complete our home.
In an earlier book, I wrote about the power of prayer when my son, Grant, was born in cardiac arrest. His tiny lungs had filled with meconium, his own body waste, and he was without oxygen for an undetermined amount of time. There was little hope, said the doctors, and should he survive, he would be a vegetable.
Get down on your knees and thank God you are still on your feet.9
—IRISH PROVERB
Around the clock, I prayed over his incubator at the hospital neonatal clinic. Eighteen tubes and wires were connected to his little body. One connected to a meter that registered how much he was breathing on his own, and how much by the machine. It showed 5 percent by him, 95 percent by the apparatus.
Then I witnessed the miracle—the answer to prayer. My son began to shake. I called a nurse.
Calling it a seizure, she ran for a doctor.
I prayed harder.
As I did, I noticed that in one of the tubes—a transparent tube from his lungs—a black substance was moving through. The seizure was casting off the blockage in his baby lungs! And I began to see a change in the meter—his dependence on the machine to produce his breathing began to drop. And two hours later, his forty-eighth hour on earth, the meter indicated fifty-fifty—half of his breathing was on his own.
When I say prayer works—I believe it.