A Pathway to Healing Through Prayer
It’s hard to match the excitement of football on weekends in the fall. From Friday-night lights on the high school gridiron to autumn Saturdays in sold-out stadiums across the country to Sunday match-ups that feature our favorite professional team, football is ingrained in our culture this time of year.
It is a high-intensity game with thrilling acrobatic plays as well as bone-jarring collisions, and those collisions often result in a range of injuries. Fortunately, most of these well-conditioned athletes heal relatively quickly from their physical wounds, although many deal with pain long after their playing days come to an end.
Regardless of whether you played football or not, all of us deal with pain of one sort or another — physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual — and very often the healing process can be agonizingly tedious.
So the question becomes, how do you heal, and how do you help others overcome pain and suffering? We know that the Bible is filled with examples of and references to healing, including this from Psalm 147:3, which states that our God “heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.” The Book of James (5:14-15) tells us that “faith in the Lord is the key to receiving healing.” That passage continues in verse 16 with a reminder about our responsibility to help others heal by “pray[ing] for one another.” This helps all of us to heal.
Pain and suffering are unavoidable realities in life, but prayer is the great elixir, so as Matthew West says in one of his popular songs, “Don’t Stop Praying!”