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He Prayed with Me
While sitting at my desk and writing (my usual daily posture), I received a call on my cell phone. I didn’t recognize the number, but it wasn’t labeled “Scam Likely,” so I decided, what the heck, who’s trying to aggravate me now . . .
When I answered, the first impression I had was that it was a marketing call of sorts. The caller, a fellow, asked if I had completed the survey from Advent Hospital for my recent doctor visit; I explained that I’d had so many visits lately that I had no idea. (I did try to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.) So he told me the name of the doctor, whom I recognized, and I told him the visit went just fine (since, although the doctor gave me more bad news, he did it kindly).
Like many people, I have been moved by the prayer and expressions of love and compassion regarding the tragic football incident involving Damar Hamlin:
Slowly I open one eye to check the digital clock. It still says 6:29 a.m., just like it did 30 seconds ago. The clock and I are in a power struggle. It wants me to stay in bed as long as I can since a good night’s sleep often evades me. Technically, I have no schedule to keep. But another part of me wants to greet the day and connect with G-d, so I open the other eye to make sure I can successfully make my way to my place of prayer; I arrive without incident.
I went to a healing meeting with my wife and it was as atrocious as I expected. Nevertheless, I was happy to be there because it beat sitting home alone on a Friday night with a wide-open internet.
“Prayer has two dimensions, one mysterious, the other not. There are simply too many cases of prayers being answered for us to deny that it makes a difference to our fate. It does. I once heard the following story. A man in a Nazi concentration camp lost the will to live—and in the death camps, if you lost the will to live, you died. That night he poured out his heart in prayer. The next morning, he was transferred to work in the camp kitchen. There he was able, when the guards were not looking, to steal potato peelings. It was these peelings that kept him alive. I heard this story from his son.” — Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks
It has been a very difficult few days for me. My usual stoicism finally failed me yesterday morning and I spent a longer than expected amount of time laying face down on the floor of my office, weeping in anguish … a deep grief expressed … crying out to God for help. The last time I allowed myself such an emotional outburst was in the weeks before the election as stories of voting shenanigans began showing up in the news. We were sitting at the dinner table, the entire family, and a wave came over me. I put my hands on my face with elbows on the table, and the tremors began … groanings too deep for words.
I didn’t sleep much last night, which isn’t very different from every other night, but last night I had something new on my mind. Images of my mother’s ravaged body after decades of experimental drugs administered by heinous injections intended to treat her RA, which they did, but they also slowly killed her off in so many other ways.
