Prayer in the Health Care System......Amber

It is Wednesday night and I think that I've finally recovered from the paper that caused me to stay up all night this past Monday. I'm taking a course in Anthropolgy of Illness and this was just supposed to be a short 10-12 page essay. I got to choose the topic and my course covers a lot of social and cultural issues of healthcare; issues such as witchcraft, shamanism, and a lot of alternative medicines.

So I thought that the effect of prayer and faith in the healthcare system would be a really good topic to use. Interesting and a really good conversation starter. But it had to be an academic paper...which meant that I can't use my own ideas and everything has to be from a peer reviewed journal. It's almost like a scientific view on prayer.

Then there was one article where the author Kevin Masters talks about how prayer has failed in the world of science, but that we shouldn't be using science to even discuss the area of prayer. He says it better...

"The basic premise of science is the functioning of a mechanistic and predictable world but the basic premise of the Biblical deity is that God acts according to God's own purposes and is not constrained by physical limits. God is metaphysical, science is physical. Natural processes are the proper domain of sciene but supernatural processes are the domain of theology" -Masters, 2005: 274

Not being able to write what's on your heart about a topic that is extremely meaningful to you...proves to be very frustrating. This paper on "prayer" caused me to spend most of the night praying about prayer and how God wanted to put this paper together. I restarted my paper at so many times that at 11pm, my computer screen was still blank.

But God is so good! And I was really encouraged to be reminded that God cannot be put into a formula and figured out. That you can't use the natural to predict His actions because He works in the Supernatural. That even the limits of the natural are like nothing to Him because He made the natural. Faith is a strange thing

"Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it."
-G.K. Chesterton

This may sound bad but I've always seemed to be more of a "feeler" than a "thinker", but I think that it's become more even over the years. I would've loved to write in my paper all of the amazing experiences in prayer I've had and how it's changed my life, but I couldn't.