Healing, Ornery Style

I like praying for healing. Especially when it works. Thursday I got to pray for a co-worker who has some kind of chronic pain. She checked back with me about an hour later and it was about fifty percent less. Another co-worker (I do work in a faith-based agency after all) commented that my prayers were "more effective" than hers, because she hadn't seen the same results praying for healing for the same situation. (Co-worker number 2 wasn't really being fair to herself, actually. The two of them pray together regularly and that is a greatly sustaining force in both their lives.) But what she said about effectiveness made me think. Could it be that in my crazy ongoing attempts to see God's kingdom come through healing, I have stumbled upon something that works, something that could work even better if put into the hands of that multitude who are holier and closer to God than I ever could be? Well if so, the attempt to transmit it should be made. So here goes. This my take-it-or-leave-it subjective and ornery guide to praying for physical healing.

 1) Be aware of the Holy Spirit moving through you. How you do this is your business. Just thinking about the Spirit sometimes is enough, A spoken invitation might be your thing. I think it just as valid to invite the Spirit as to make yourself specially aware that he's always with you. Really there's not much functional difference. Ultimately the goal is to be a conduit for his power to flow through. Yes, you're going to have to feel something. I get a sort of tingly feeling. Some people feel heat. (Did I mention this is subjective?)
2) With the permission of the one being prayed for, lay your hand on or near the part of the body with the problem.
3) Tell the body part to get better, tell the pain to go away, something like that. Believe that God has actually given you the authority to heal. That means it's your job to call it. Use the imperative mood -- tell the thing to happen. Keep it simple, though. As soon as you start discussing medical conditions with God, you are praying for healing in a way that Jesus never did. And try not to experiment with catchphrases that you've heard. "Come into alignment", and "I plead the blood." are near useless as far as I'm concerned.
4) Wait. Relax your hand. Expect, feel God's power flowing through your hand. This is something I've picked up recently. I used to imagine that I was a wizard or a Lord (see the 1st Thomas Covenant Trilogy) directing fire from my hand at something and burning it up. This is pretty well the opposite operation to ministering God's power. Funny thing about the wizard thing is that my hand tenses up and it seems to choke off the flow of God's power. On the occasion I mentioned, when I relaxed, I actually felt the tingling move down my arm and it seemed to enter the body of my co-worker.
5) You can't pray forever. (It's just not feasible) so if you have no, or incomplete results, you have to conclude with something. I usually ask God to remain in the location where the problem is and complete the healing.


Lots more could be said.  But this is stuff that (I think) I've learned.

Don't worry about the big E.

The idea that evolution might be proved strikes fear in many Christians' hearts. But not so. If evolution were conclusively demonstrated, the only thing that would really change is that we might have to take the Genesis account less literally. So what. Assuming that it's completely proved, what would we have? A phenomenon of gradually improving life over billions of years. That's all it would be. A phenomenon. A feature of our mysterious universe that can tell us nothing about how it came to exist. A feature void of interpretation. The interpretation is still up to you.

The Worldview with a Hole

Houston, we have a problem.

Back in the early days of the 'third wave' charismatic renewal (OK, to be more precise, the Vineyard) there was a new paradigm, a new worldview that asserted itself to correct what we of the western materialist bent had believed all our lives. Materialism says there is nothing, and no cause but that which is material, physical, empirical. It's the prevalent view in many countries and we Christians have largely unthinkingly accepted it and tacked on our idea of God on to it. It was this worldview that gave us a basically non-miraculous, functionally deistic lifestyle. After all, the thinking goes, why would God want dirty his hands messing about with the material world he created to run a certain way. The paradigm shift we experienced back in the day, taught us that this materialism plus God wordview had a major component missing. That component is what is generally referred to as the 'Spiritual Realm.' It contains the whole gamut of angels, demons and of course God in the person of the Holy Spirit, and once you include it in your worldview you can allow for and experience miracles like never before, because you can start to grasp the idea of  multitudinous forces exerting pressure on the physical, empirical reality -- forces you don't understand, that naturally need prayer and the constant interaction from our Father who reigns in that realm as in all realms.

So what's the problem? Well it looks to me that materialism has largely reasserted itself, and we have ceased to be aware of the spiritual in our day to day lives. Now I grant you this has not happened in a vacuum. We have been in reaction. We don't like to be people who see "a demon behind every bush." We have found that people really do have chemical imbalances in their brains, which may or may not be demonically influenced. The medical profession has made great strides even in our life time to solve problems that in the past would have needed a major miracle. I think we also find physical factors and causes less scary and every time we have been able to attribute something to the physical there's been a false sense of comfort. But above all, there has been a dearth of the gift of discernment in the church by which all spiritual entities are perceived. Have we marginalized discerners? Have we in our reaction, made it unattractive to discern spirits, angels, demons? Maybe. But it looks like we are flying blind. The spiritual realm hasn't gone anywhere, for all our eyes are shut. It's time to pray for the gift of discernment. It scares the heck out of me, but I think it's something we need. Again.

Polish - A personal red flag

Ever think that something is just too good to be true? I seem to be plagued with this thought all the time. Especially in the Christian realm. When something, anything, worship music, teaching, website, is produced with too much polish, I have a hard time believing it. Some months ago, I saw a video of a worship time produced from Bethel Church of Redding, CA. It was amazing, if you could believe what you saw. I was ambivalent. Yes it seemed authentic, except that the video production and the facial expressions were so perfect as the camera passed, it was hard to imagine that 1) the thing hadn't been rehearsed like any other music video, although it purported spontaneity and 2) that the performers and non performers were unaware of moments when they were in view.

Several years back there was a movement on for Christians to perfect their art and not be 'mediocre.' I don't know whether this ties in to this or not, but I hope that the result of this hasn't been more polish. This pilgrim doesn't handle polish well.

It's Sunday. Let's pray for the church.

Something in me cries out for change. "There must be more than this" is a phrase in a current worship song. Maybe it should be "There must something different than this." What will it take to actually be agents of the kingdom of God? What will it take for us to 1) Walk in the power and presence of Jesus all the time, producing fruit in season (i.e. results!) and 2) be solid, trustworthy, dependable people. Why do I list these separately? Because there's a perception out there that if you seek after 1) you will probably not qualify for 2).

There are, I'm certain, other dichotomies out there. "If you want this, you can't have that." But I reject them. I want the whole enchilada (as the saying goes.)  I want a church filled with thousands of people, all disciples of the Messiah, (not of anyone else!) in proper, healthy, relationships with each other, worshipping God in his fullness with all their hearts, producing fruit in all areas of ministry through the power of Him who dwells with us, walking in love for each other and all around them, with leaders who are not the focal point or the motivation of the church's activity, but rather who faithfully keep the whole already moving entity from straying from God's path which is clear to all. This is my prayer for my church. Pray it for yours, too.

Utility

In the previous post, admittedly in a very oblique way, I touch on an idea that has been becoming more and more clear to me. It's something I've used in the past but not really given a name. But I have one now and that name is utility.

Utility as a principle is a criterion for judging any theory, theological, philosophical or otherwise. I've used it in the past to choose open theism over classic theism, because one of the problems I have with the idea that every bit of minutia about my life is foreknown and therefore (people who ignore this 'therefore' are just being dishonest, in my books) predetermined is that it's no damn use to me. Such a view precludes prayer or any effort at all. Why would I involve my heart or passion in anything I do under such a scheme? Indeed most devout classic theists live like thoroughgoing open theists, praying to move the heart of a God that technically they believe to have already been in the future and decided it by knowing it, but willing to dichotomize and follow their hearts. Thus partly based on the non-utility of the theory of God existing outside a time that also already exists, I find I can't espouse it.

The post 'in other news' pokes fun at the atheistic religionists that I frequently encounter on my favourite tech news site, Slashdot. They pillory ad infinitum, at nauseam, all who refuse to espouse the idea that the complexity of life we see every day as merely a product of chance. Intelligent Design for them is an epithet, synonymous with stupidity. And yet, when we encounter complexity, as the character, Alison Blake, did in Eureka, (Series finale is next Monday!) it's of no use at all (no utility) to assume that it's a mere product of chance, and we just don't. The researchers who discovered Flame and Stuxnet, based on their findings of complexity, did not immediately assume that the right combination of operating system, hardware and atmospheric conditions had caused these targeted malware attacks to simply evolve. Rather, they theorized a concerted effort by technologically enabled government departments. And it appears they were right.

So also every investigative agency on the planet. Nothing complex and seemingly concerted can be viewed as random coincidence. CIA or NSA analysts would lose their jobs if they started with the assumption of randomness. So also everyone else. The most thoroughgoing (I love that word) atheistic evolutionist would not assume that time and chance produced a nasty prank against his daughter in school. And yet we are told, against all that we intuitively know, that underlying all of the universe there is a phenomenon of chance producing the complexity of life we see around us. Can it be? Written into the fabric of the universe is a basic principle -- evolution caused by chance alone -- that runs counter to all our method of living? Nuts. So I reject the idea. It has no utility. Oh wait, I forgot. It does have a use! It's a handy-dandy way of ignoring and helping others to ignore the uncomfortable idea that Someone might have caused me!

In other news...

The slashdot council on doctrinal purity (SCDP) has threatened to subject itself to a taste of its own medicine and resign en masse over failing to censure 'Eureka' writer Bruce Miller for an apparent 'Intelligent Design' slip of the pen. In episode S05E11, 'Eureka' character Dr. Alison Blake, observing the effects of a mysterious computer glitch was made to utter the blasphemous words, "it can't be an accident -- it's too complex!" When asked why there was not an immediate and caustic post on slashdot on the night of the show's airing SCDP members admitted that they had been too interested in the plot to notice and, in an unguarded moment, one even guessed that the story might have been less interesting should the glitch have been of completely random origin.

It was only later, after extensive reprogramming, that SCDPers have turned their usual inquisitional fervour on themselves and threatened to resign because of their failure to shield young minds from the pernicious idea that one can infer design from complexity. Earlier today, the SCDP released a statement admitting that its formerly unimpeachably pure scientific outlook had become tainted with mere common sense and begging, on behalf of all members, to be released from their essential slashdot duties. The release explained that although the members knew that slashdot could not function without their input, they would rather see it temporarily crippled rather than 'endanger the minds of the impressionable.' Faced with this crisis, the slashdot high directorate (SHD) has not accepted the resignation of the SCDP but has instead instituted regular beatings for SCDP members. We are assured from inside sources that SCDPers have found this quite acceptable and that in future, no such further slip-ups will occur.