True to Form

Have no fear, Elizabeth; your prayers will be heard.

Elizabeth is from Yonkers and she’s suffering leg pain, hypertension, and sciatica, among other ailments. And she’s asking people to pray for her.

I’ve never met Elizabeth, but I learned a little bit about her this week when I was walking home and spotted a form she had completed on the sidewalk.

I was about to dismiss the folded sheet of blue paper as trash and continue walking, but once I saw handwritten notes across the back of the form I had to know what was going on.

I’ve been picking stuff up off the ground ever since I was child, much to my late mother’s consternation, and there’s nothing more exciting than reading the words of a stranger.

This probably qualifies as some kind of invasion of privacy, but I can’t help it. I like to read about other people’s lives. And it’s not just me: there’s an online publication, Found Magazine, that’s dedicated to this type of material.

It turned out that this form was a request for prayers from an evangelical church in Texas and apparently Elizabeth, who attends services at a church in my neighborhood, had dropped it before she had a chance to mail it off to the Lone Star State.

“Please fill out completely,” the form said. “Write prayer needs on back. Our prayer team will continue to pray for you.”

I’ve never heard of the Texas church, which I shall refrain from naming. I did a little research and learned that the pastor is “an anointed healing evangelist who has devoted her life to carrying a message of hope, deliverance, and healing to the nations.”

Neither Rain, Nor Sleet...

The church’s website has an online prayer form, but Elizabeth from Yonkers elected to go by snail mail as she listed her health problems and asked for help.

A lot of people will roll their eyes at this sort of thing, but I know what it’s like to be sick and frightened as I struggled with chronic fatigue and other immune system problems for a large part of my life. You can lose hope very quickly and become hostile, angry, and quite depressed.

I look back on some of the awful things I said when my health was really bad, all this “why me” stuff, and I feel quite ashamed of myself. But shame just make things worse and it’s far more important to be grateful for every day on earth.

There are times when things are so bad and so far out of your control that all you can do is pray. I’m going through some difficult times right now and I’m spending a lot of time asking the Almighty for help.

I’m not overly impressed with this Texas ministry, but that’s not my business. Clearly Elizabeth sees something worthwhile in the organization and so all I have to do is pass the message along.

When I was in Colorado I came across a photo of some children that was stuck within the pages of a used book and I eventually mailed them back to the bookstore in hopes that the pictures might make their way back to their rightful owners.

And that’s what I’m going to do with Elizabeth’s prayer form. This afternoon I put a short post-it note on the front, slipped the form into an envelope and dropped it in the mail.

The Texas prayer team will soon be praying for Elizabeth’s health, and so will I.