He is the Lord Who Heals
Jenna Haugen
This article originally appeared in the December 2024 issue of FOCUS.
Satan dreads nothing but prayer. His one concern is to keep the saints from praying. He fears nothing from prayerless studies, prayerless work, prayerless religion. He laughs at our toil, he mocks our wisdom, but he trembles when we pray. – Samuel Chadwick (The New Encyclopedia of Christian Quotations (Hampshire, UK: John Hunt Publishing, 2000), p. 783.)
I fear that a part of the discomfort in praying for or with our patients is that the sacred-secular divide has crept into our personal and professional understanding. We are at risk of subconsciously relying on the material world to sustain us and flirting with the hubris that we are self-sufficient healers.
Prayer Changes Us
I think back to an encounter I had in Kenya last year. I was working in a rural hospital where it was expected practice to pray with each unit as we finished rounding. I had a very sick, frail patient with pneumonia who required 15LO2 on an NBR mask – our maximum ventilatory support. With no ventilators, a constrained formulary, and virtually no transfer options, he was in dangerous condition. I warned his family that they should prepare themselves, then I prayed for healing and God’s sovereign will for this patient. The next day he was on nasal prongs on 5L, the day after he was on room air with normal O2 sats. When I examined him that day, I said to one of the Kenyan nurses, “Thank God for antibiotics.” Her gentle but clear admonition was, “Jenna, you prayed for him,” implying that I ought to rightly attribute God’s hand as the true source of healing. I discovered a new dependence on the Lord in that season and prayed with fervour that the Lord would do what I could not. I quickly came to realize that it is always the case that I need Him to do this work, whether I’m working in a tertiary hospital in Calgary or a rural hospital in Kapsowar. But, unfortunately, between biotechnical advances, collective wealth, and creature comforts, the veil between us and God is growing in the West.
Prayer forces us to bend our knee in humility. We are imperfect healers. Recently, I made a mistake in hospital with a pregnant patient. I was rushing through a patient encounter to join a colleague in the OR waiting for surgical assist. I missed a part of her medical history that was buried inconspicuously in her record. After I had administered a contraindicated medication, a nurse notified me of this precious information. I was nauseous and bewildered. I immediately stopped to pray that God would protect her and her baby. Thankfully, no complications occurred and she was gracious with my error. Mistakes like this force me to remember that there is still one greater who beckons the morning light. (“There’s Only One (Holy One)”, Track 3 on Caedmon’s Call, Share the Well (Essential Records, 2024)) Samuel Chadwick, Wesleyan pastor and writer of The Path of Prayer describes this succinctly:
For prayer that humbles, sets the soul
From all delusions free,
And teaches it how utterly Dear Lord,
it hangs on thee. (Samuel Chadwick, The Path of Prayer (Heritage of Truth, 2013))
And so, a fruit of prayer in practice is that it restores Christ to the centre of life, sluffing off the secular perspective, helping us to correctly orient ourselves in relation to our work, our role in healing and our God. The integrated life of a disciple of Christ brings their profession into agreement with their faith, not their faith into agreement with culture. Hebrews 1:2-3 declares that Christ is the creator and sustainer of all things. He is ultimately the healer and we are dependent on Him. As it says in Acts 17:28, “in Him we live and move and have our being.” Praying with patients is an act of rebellion against a disintegrated, materialistic worldview.
Prayer Ministers to Patients
God has commissioned us to join Him in reordering the world, bringing comfort and healing to people. But, naturally, in our vocation, we lean into our scientific training to bring healing. Now, prayer is not a cosmic wand that we wave at our hardships, but neither is it homeopathic wishful thinking. The Scriptures tell us that the hand of God is moved when we pray, whether in the Old Testament where God responds to Abraham’s pleas for mercy (Genesis 16:18-33) or in the parable of the persistent widow (Luke 18:1-8), where Jesus encourages us to persist in asking the Lord for justice, which He is eager to give. James 5:13-15 takes us one step further and encourages us to pray for physical healing. Healing ministry requires wisdom and caution, but, steering well clear of denominational differences and discerning false teaching, I will simply say, we are encouraged to pray for body and spirit, whether we see the fruit of this or not.
And let me not neglect the treasure of comfort that prayer is. During another sleepless call shift, I induced and delivered an early third trimester stillborn baby. I find these moments particularly heavy and was feeling poured out. After the delivery, the family asked for spiritual support, but due to the time, there was no one available until many hours later. I shared my background and offered to pray with them until the clergy could come. They jumped at the offer, so I knelt by their bed, with the father weeping, holding his stillborn child and started to pray. I could barely put two words together; they weren’t coherent or thoughtful. I tripped all over myself. And yet, I felt so much relief because they weren’t looking at me to save them. We all looked heavenward together to “the father of mercies and God of all comfort”:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. (2 Corinthians 1:3-5 ESV)
How Should We Pray?
Praying for patients can become a natural part of practice as we grow in our dependence on God. Any prayer practice we have in our personal life can be applied through our work as well. There are endless ways we can incorporate prayer into our daily rituals: we can pray for competence and caution before surgery while scrubbing, pray for clinical acumen before we open every clinic door, pray for wisdom mid-appointment when we’re with a difficult patient or delivering hard news, pray for the safety of our patients when we leave the hospital on our drive home, pray together with our fellow Christian colleagues in public or private, pray after we’ve made a mistake for the safety of our patients and for fair restitution, or pray for forgiveness in the hallway when we’ve been curt with our residents or colleagues. Prayer should become a way of life. (As shared by Brother Lawrence in Practicing the Presence of God (Martino Fine Books, 2016))
A beloved practice for me is following in the traditions of the saints. During residency, I found a modified Prayer of Maimonides in the office of one of my attendings. I made a copy of it, framed it, and put it on my office desk – both as a statement of my commitment as a Christian physician and a reminder for me to pray through my daily work.
Praying with patients is a more nuanced endeavour. I think the general approach is to avoid spiritual interactions and walk on eggshells in fear of a college complaint. In truth, there is a tension, as we are charged with being “wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matt 10:16 ESV), practicing in a post-Christian culture growing more hostile to our faith. At the same time, I’ve come to wonder, does the College truly hold me to greater account than creator God, maker of heaven and earth? I have had a number of moments in practice where, in my heart, I was stepping out with a spirit of pride, either judging my patients for their poor choices or feeling accomplished and self-sufficient in my skills. In those moments, I have strongly felt the Lord speak caution to my heart, prompting me that He “rends the heavens and comes down” in defense of his precious children (Psalm 18). He reminded me it is a privilege to do this work, and I best handle His children with great care. It was sobering. So, if we keep in mind Colossians 3:12 (therefore…clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience) and 2 Timothy 2:24 (And the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but must be kind to everyone, able to teach, not resentful), I think we are well positioned to approach our patients with Christian charity at the centre.
I have not written this as a “how to” manual for praying with patients and I don’t believe there is an algorithm to this. We must grow in spiritual maturity and depend on the Holy Spirit for wisdom based on our unique contexts and relationship with patients. (
For a review on practical tips, clinical and biblical evidence for prayer in practice, have a look at the CMDA Today article from CMDA US titled “Praying With Our Patients”. https://resources.cmda.org/article/praying-with-our-patients/)For example, I work predominantly with marginalized populations, which bear a lot of unspoken trauma. Accordingly, I am cautious to avoid further religious, institutional, or health care mistreatment. If I feel a prompt or desire to pray with a patient, I usually try to find common ground by asking if they have a faith background or prayer/meditation practices of any kind. If they do, I ask if they would appreciate praying together. If not, I may tell them that I am a person of a faith and ask if they feel prayer would be valuable to them. I am conscious of the potential power differential, but weigh that against the real blessing they may experience through engaging in spiritual care with their physician. At all times, I aim to honour the patient’s spiritual autonomy, the need for consent, and their right not to participate in a spiritual interaction, just as I would hope to receive.
Conclusion
How should we pray? Often, wisely, for and, sometimes, with our patients. Why should we pray? Because we believe that God did, does, and will heal people, whether their spirit or their body, through modern medicine or divine intervention, today or in some future tomorrow. Because prayer blesses our patients with His great comfort. Because prayer positions us in agreement with His ordering work on the earth. Because prayer humbles us as we bend the knee, claim our dependence on Him, and acknowledge our failings. Because prayer declares that Christ is King of His Kingdom; Jehovah Rapha is the healer.