Warning: This post is not for those with feeble stomachs...
The past 36 hours have been pretty rough at the Sanders home. This weekend, all four of us were hit with the same nasty stomach bug. On Sunday night, three of us (me, Christine and Bethany) were shooting off one after the other like geysers in Yellowstone. I counted 15 barfs in the span of 30 minutes. I'm thinking of calling Guinness.
But the barfing also taught me something about prayer.
Sunday night's trouble started with Christine. Just before the kids bedtime, she grabbed a barf bucket, collapsed on the couch and said she felt queasy. Being the spiritual giant that I am, I paused the Mavericks game and said a quick little prayer for her.
Lord, please heal Christine's tummy. I pray she'll get some rest tonight and feel better in the morning. Amen.
That was at 7 p.m. By 9 p.m. Bethany and I had both thrown up several times and I felt I had already met my annual quota of gallons-of-pizza-barf-cleaned-up. The Mavs lost and we all went to bed, each with our own bedside bucket.
This particular stomach bug was not only strong, it was punctual. For the rest of the night, we awoke at exact one-hour intervals. Every hour on the hour someone was puking. 11 p.m. Midnight. 1 a.m. 2 a.m. 3 a.m. 4 a.m. 5 a.m. All within 11 minutes of the top of the hour. Uncanny. The constant interruptions were not good for our rest or our recovery but somewhere around 3 a.m. I realized they were good for our prayers.
Lord Jesus, please come and heal us quickly. Just as you had mercy on Jairus, just as you had mercy on the centurion, please have mercy on us now. Heal us and our children. Remove this disease from our household and any foul spirit set against us, and we will praise you for it. We pray in the name and the power of Jesus Christ. Amen.
I prayed a radically different prayer at 3 a.m. than I did at 7 p.m. With my guts in a tangle and my head worried about my little girl getting dehydrated, I was much more invested, and willing to sacrifice much more than pausing the game to get an answer. I was getting desperate.
And that's when it hit me: I was praying down angels because of a stomach bug. My tummy hurt. I had to take some Pepto and clean up some mess. I cannot even imagine what Matt Chandler's prayers are like right now. Or Andy McQuitty's. Or Melinda Wells'. I had a tiny taste of desperation and I prayed with much more urgency. Lord, teach us to be pained by what pains you and pray with urgency for your healing in the world.
