Miracles Needed

Today as I began walking, I realized that I was going to be able to pray while I walked, despite it being morning time. But I was tired of my normal prayer content. I get so wrapped up in praying for my church folks and praying for direction for our ministry and praying for the various needs of my family. Sometimes it makes all that feel heavier instead of lighter to be so earnest about it.

So I decided I didn't want to pray for anything at all related to myself. The song "Dona Nobis Pacem" was going through my head, so I decided to pray for peace, for the whole 3 miles.

My 3 mile walk is made up of 45 laps around an indoor track. So I decided to give each 5-lap set to a different country. I prayed for Israel/Palestine, Sudan/Darfur/Chad, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, China, the U.S., and Honduras.

I tried to give each lap over to a different person or population with the country. I prayed for leaders, for children, for women, for men. I prayed for soldiers and police a lot. I prayed for diplomats and other people of influence. I prayed for settlers and refugees and people who have seen and experienced horrible things and people who have inflicted horrible things.

I realized as I prayed these things that what I was praying for was rather audacious. When I prayed for President Bashir of Sudan - a man who has shown very little humanity in dealing with the strife in Darfur - I used a visualization technique I came up with as the war in Iraq was starting. I imagined his heart, having an out-of-body experience, if you will. It doesn't look like the glowing Sacred Heart of Jesus, but comes out kind of like that. It looks like an anatomical heart, but I know that it's made of a substance that is totally fragile. It's tissue, but it's so spongy and delicate that touching it too hard would cause it to crumble. The closest substance I can think to compare it to is florist's clay formed in very thin layers. Anyway, I visualize Bashir's heart in this terribly fragile state, and then imagine good, strong blood flowing through it and healing it, strengthening it, making it right again.

It's an odd visualization for someone who hates blood as much as I do, but it works for me. It gives me a way to pray for people that I would otherwise consider beyond sympathy. Clearly there is something broken within these men that send so many people to violent, horrible deaths. But we can't just leave them that way.

At one point, I was praying, I think for women in Iraq, that they would be softened, rather than hardened, by their experiences of war. I was thinking about how we all develop defenses in order to get through difficult situations, but how those defenses end up causing us problems later. I was praying that they could be filled with grace and strength to the point that they could remain sympathetic and hopeful. And I suddenly felt like that was a really arrogant, demanding thing to pray. Why should they have to be saints, to react to war in super-human ways that I myself probably wouldn't be capable of?

And yet, that is the only way cycles of violence are ever stopped -- when people full of grace are able to take in the trauma and transform it in their hearts into passion for peace and life and reconciliation.

I was picturing the hearts of Israeli settlers being changed, the heart of Netanyahu being turned around on the settlement issue, people realizing that they don't have to exact revenge for history. I was praying for outrageous reconciliation.

And that's what's so great about prayer. God is so big. We don't have to pray for things that seem possible. In fact, what would the point of that be? It's these big, huge problems that seem intractable that really deserve prayer.

As I was picturing all these various people throughout the earth, people with power and people with very little power, I kept thinking about movies. Some of my favorite movies are the ones in which an unexpected hero makes a difference by slowly by surely causing a change in the heart of the "bad guy". Evil is not overcome by violence, but by love, love that refuses to see anyone as irredeemable.

We've all seen these movies. And we love to believe in them. As I prayed for these seemingly impossible transformations to happen in the hearts of people around the world, I made it make sense by giving each of those people, leaders, soldiers, settlers, refugees, a story of redemption, someone or something to touch their core and help them see a new way of being.

What would such a thing mean for a North Korean nuclear scientist? For a young boy living in a refugee camp in Chad? For President Bashir? For Ahmadinajad of Iran, or a policeman on the streets of Iran?

As I prayed, I thought about my faith and how it relates to these people of other faiths and no faith. Is that blood I pictured coursing through the vessels of Bashir's fragile heart the blood of Jesus? Maybe. I am a Christian, and the power of the gospel story is the strongest thing I know for transforming fear and ignorance and hatred into peace and reconciliation and love. I believe that Jesus Christ can work in people's lives without them having to "believe in him." So that is how I prayed for them. It was my prayer. It was for their welfare and salvation, in the most real senses of the word.

I guess you could say that I was praying for miracles this morning. It's hard to imagine how peace can be established without a thousand million tiny and not-so-tiny miracles, like the kind in those movies I like. Those kinds of miracles, I believe, are the sort that are helped along by prayer.

It was such a relief to get out of my own life for a little while and take part in the reconciling work that God is doing on this planet even now. Did it make a difference? I believe it did, though I know I'll never know how.