Prayers

I have never been very good at praying. I start, then lose my focus, and my mind begins to wander. Soon I forget what I am praying about, get frustrated, and give up. During radiation treatment, I remembered hearing a minister say that if you don't know what to pray for, pray the Bible. I thought that I could surely handle that and decided that I would start reading the Psalms, underline verses that ministered to me, and start using them as my morning prayers. I read ten Psalms a day for fifteen days, underlining and praying scripture back to God. After fifteen days, I felt that these had to have been some of the most heartfelt effective prayers of my life and decided that I would start over and each day pray back the underlined portions, ten Psalms a day. I have continued doing this and I am still amazed how the right verses come up on the days I need them most.

On day fifteen, when physically I was probably at my lowest point, I read Psalm 150. The last verse says:

"Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.
Praise the Lord!"

That is a tough pill to swallow for a lung cancer patient, but I still had breath, and so I praised the Lord.

The days leading up to the tests and treatments are the most anxious. There seemed to always be a lot of "what ifs" running through my mind. Every time I would get worried, Psalms would come up about God calming a situation. One of my favorites that came up during one of these times was Psalms 107. I have always had the vision that this cancer battle was like being in a boat tossed by the waves, so verses 25 to 29 touched me the most.

"For He spoke and raised up a stormy wind,
Which lifted up the waves of the sea.
They rose up to the heavens, they went down to the depths;
Their soul melted away in their misery.
They reeled and staggered like a drunken man,
And were at their wits' end.
Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble,
And he brought them out of their distresses.
He caused the storm to be still,
So that the waves of the sea were hushed."

Finally, after seven months, we heard the report we had been waiting to hear: The cancer had not spread to any new sites. The active sites seen in previous scans were now either inactive or decreased in activity. The primary lung tumor has shrunk by half and is possibly dead.

The next morning Psalm 81 was the first for my daily prayer. Here is what I had underlined some three months ago:

"Sing for joy to God our strength;
Shout joyfully to the God of Jacob.
You called in trouble and I rescued you;
I answered you in the hiding place of thunder."

I just can't add anything to that but "Amen!"