ONE DAY SOME YEARS AGO, a good friend wasn't feeling well and asked me to pray for her. I agreed, but immediately felt swamped by doubts. Prayer had been extremely helpful to me with financial difficulties, troubled relationships, and educational challenges, among other things. But I wasn't totally convinced that prayer could heal sickness, even though I'd seen it work for other people and had even had a few healings through prayer myself. Somehow, at the moment, those examples seemed like distant memories or exceptions to the rule.
But I'd promised my friend I'd pray, so I began in spite of my fears. Eventually, I conceded that, even though I wasn't sure my prayer would be effective, the least I could do was to view my friend from a spiritual, rather than a material, perspective. The result was twofold: Not only did I conquer my fear, but my friend was healed.
In subsequent years, I've had many occasions to pray about illnesses and injuries, both for myself and other people. Never again have I feared, to the same degree, that prayer was insufficient to meet whatever difficulty I or anyone else was facing. That's not to say that I haven't had to remind myself, as I do constantly, of the efficacy of prayer. But that experience with my friend put into perspective what prayer needs to accomplish, and that has made spiritual healing a lot less daunting to me.
