I Am in Here (19 page)

In many ways, though, he made that decision years before. Sean has a pronounced stutter, a speech impairment he's carried with him since childhood. Although Sean is brilliant, he didn't do
well in high school, falling between the cracks the way children with disabilities often do. In high school, Sean and I shared a love of literature, but he didn't study much, and he liked to tease me for being such a geek.

Sean didn't go to college upon graduation, choosing instead to take a blue-collar job where he didn't have to speak much while he pursued a career as a rock musician. After a few years, he realized he was at a crossroads. He could let his life, his work, and his future be defined by his disability, or he could figure out how to move forward regardless of his disability.

Sean chose to be a How Person.

For the next decade, Sean worked intensely to overcome his speech impairment. He went to college, where he graduated at the top of his class before going on to law school. Today we joke with Sean that it is difficult to get him to stop talking. He communicates with audiences both large and small as a corporate attorney, adjunct college professor, musician, and Sunday school teacher. When he speaks, you don't notice his disability. You listen to what he says, especially when he is telling one of his many Irish jokes.

Sean introduced me to healing prayer when Elizabeth was a toddler. He asked if he and his wife, Susan, could come down from Boston and pray for Elizabeth. I was a bit apprehensive at first, but I trusted Sean not to do anything that would be harmful in any way. When Sean and Susan arrived, we all sat and talked about our lives for a while.

As Elizabeth darted around the room, I reached out and pulled her up on my lap. “I know you're in there, honey,” I said, touching my forehead to hers. “We're coming to get you.” I put Elizabeth back down on the carpet, and we all knelt next to her as Sean placed his hands on her head.

“Elizabeth,” he said softly, “God loves you. He knows you're hurting, honey. He sees your burden and wants to bear it for you.” She sat still as he prayed over her. “God, please put your arms around Elizabeth right now, and let her know that you are here for her. Take this burden from her and heal her mind and body. We ask this in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

It was a short prayer, but it meant so much to me. I could tell that it meant a lot to Elizabeth as well, because she looked right into Sean's eyes for several seconds at the end. Like most children with autism, Elizabeth had great difficulty looking anyone in the eye. This was special. She was thanking Sean. She knew that help was on the way.

“God has big plans for Elizabeth,” Sean said with a smile. “I don't know what they are, but I have a feeling they're going to be big.”

“Bigger than we can imagine,” I replied.

Years passed, and I dabbled in healing prayer, although I didn't think that I was dabbling. I was praying sincerely but ignorant as to how to pray effectively. Tired and depressed, I reached out to Sean over a cup of tea during one of my Boston business trips. “I've been praying for the children for so long. It seems like nothing is happening. I don't know what to do anymore.”

Sean responded with an impish smile, “Why don't you do what you've done with all the educational and medical stuff? Stop messing around and learn from someone who actually knows what they're doing.” A good place to start, he suggested, was Agnes Sanford.

Searching the internet, I found that Agnes had written many books on living a Spirit-filled life. She described herself not as a healer but as a teacher of healing prayer. Her belief in its power
came when she herself was healed of debilitating depression. In her own ministry, she started with small healings and grew to seeing countless gravely ill people healed by God.

Agnes told the story of volunteering as a Gray Lady in the Red Cross at the Tilton Army Hospital at Fort Dix during World War II. Her cart was stocked with candy, magazines, and cigarettes, but Agnes saw men suffering and had more than candy to give them. Because she was forbidden by hospital policy to talk about God, she told them about a power like electricity that could flow through her and make them well. Soldiers of all faiths listened to her quiet prayers, her hands gently touching their wounded limbs, hidden under a strategically placed comic book.

Agnes believed that we are all “children of the Light” who can be a channel for God's healing power. In her fascinating autobiography,
Sealed Orders
, she instructs us to start with small miracles and move to larger challenges as we grow spiritually. Don't start with cancer, Agnes suggests. Better to start with a missing credit card.

Taking Agnes's cue, my adventure in healing prayer started with a lost rodent. Somehow my niece's hamster got out of its cage while it was entrusted to my care. I had twenty-four hours before she would return to pick it up, and I prayed long and hard that God would send the little fur ball my way.

Praying is not easy for me. My mind often wanders. I pray for the children, and then I start thinking about my to-do list for them. This time I was really trying to focus on that hamster and nothing else.

All day long I prayed. I looked in the couches and under the couches. I looked under beds. I called the little bugger, as if it were a dog. I looked in closets and cabinets. I wandered around
the house like I was playing a game of hide-and-seek as I asked God if I was getting warmer or colder.

By the end of the day, I was exhausted. My niece was coming in the morning, and I had not even had a glimpse of the rodent. It was bedtime.

Bleary-eyed, I was in the bathroom, saying one last prayer, when I looked down and saw two beady, black hamster eyes looking up at me.

Slowly, I knelt down. I was close to victory, but it could scamper away at any moment. Ever so slowly, I cupped my hands around this wayward little fur ball.

Gotcha!

Who says God doesn't answer prayers?

My rodent victory gave me the encouragement to pray for bigger things. God seemed to be prodding me along like a toddler taking her first tentative steps. By trusting in God and receiving the answers to small prayers, we find the strength to pray and trust and wait on bigger things.

The waiting is the hard part for me. I have to remind myself that God is not a server at the local diner, waiting to take my order. Trust and relationship are built over time. If God sent a deluge of healing power through a channel the size of a straw, it would be swept away.

The problem is: I am that straw.

I had been praying for God to heal Elizabeth for a long time. The problem isn't God; it's just that my channel is only robust enough for missing rodents right now. As I am in the process of growing, I need the humility to reach out to others who are further developed. I need to take her to someone whose channel is bigger.

I suspected Agnes's channel was big enough for autism. We would go wherever she was. But with a trip to Wikipedia, I was
devastated to learn that Agnes passed away in 1982. Fortunately, we had a backup channel: Agnes had mentored a young Lutheran pastor named Bill Vaswig.

Pastor Bill came to know Agnes and her ministry when she healed his teenage son, Philip, of schizophrenia through prayer. Pastor Bill wrote about this healing in a marvelous little book called
I Prayed, He Answered
. Pastor Bill is now almost eighty years old and sees a small number of people, many of whom travel great distances.

One hot August afternoon, I anxiously dialed his number. What would I say to him? “I'm desperate for my children to be healed”? “Please, please, please help me”? “After a decade of trying everything, I am exhausted and can't take it much longer”?

As soon as he answered the phone, I was overcome with a sense of calm. He was warm and kind and listened to me ramble on about our journey, my faith in God, and how much I wanted the children to be well.

“What should we do now?” I asked. To my delight, he said to bring the children to Seattle so that we could pray for them. He said that he loved big challenges.

When I told Sean about all of this, he was overjoyed for us: we were going to see one of his beacons on this earth. Healing prayer had become even more important to Sean in those days. Tragically, his wife, Susan, had a massive stroke about two years after they prayed for Elizabeth. She was only thirty-eight. It was a devastating blow to her health and left her with a seizure disorder that had seriously impaired her life. In the years following her stroke, Susan and Sean had been to countless experts and hospitals across the country to try to make sure Susan was getting the best available care.

“Could you do me a favor, Ginnie?” Sean asked. “When you're out there in Seattle, could you please ask Pastor Bill if I could bring Susan sometime for him to pray over her too?”

“I'll call you right back,” I said, hanging up the phone.

I couldn't make Sean and Sue wait. They were carrying a heavy burden as well.

I picked up the phone and sheepishly called Pastor Bill back. “Could I pile a brain injury on top of autism?” I asked. I explained how Sean had been the reason that I knew about Pastor Bill in the first place and that Susan needed prayer.

“No problem. I told you, I love big challenges.”

I thanked him and called Sean right back. “Pack your bags, you're coming with us to Seattle.”

After getting over his shock, Sean was thrilled. Despite the difficultly of traveling, Susan immediately agreed to go.

We met Pastor Bill at his tiny office in Issaquah, Washington. Sue and Sean stayed with Charles and Elizabeth so that I could have some quiet time with Pastor Bill.

A tall Norwegian with silver hair and a warm smile, Pastor Bill shook my hand and immediately asked me about the children. He wanted to understand autism so that he would know how best to pray for them. I tried to explain the biomedical issues and ended by reading some of Elizabeth's poems.

Pastor Bill asked to see each of the children individually to pray for them. Elizabeth was first. He stood behind her and I knelt in front. Pastor Bill gently placed his hands on Elizabeth's head and quietly prayed, “Dear God. You know Elizabeth. You made her. You love her. Can you put your arms around her now, Jesus? Can you let her know that you are here with her?”

Elizabeth looked up at Pastor Bill for a moment. He continued, “God, we lift up Elizabeth. We see her healthy and strong. We
see her body being healed of all its problems. We see her stomach being healed and her brain being healed. We don't know all the things that need to be healed, but you do, God. You know Elizabeth. We pray that your healing power comes into Elizabeth and heals her. We pray that she be healed and for her to speak. We pray these things in Jesus's name. Amen.”

Elizabeth looked up again, but this time she jumped up and ran out the door. Good thing Pastor Bill likes big challenges.

Charles was next. We prayed for him to be able to learn more easily. We prayed for him to be healed. He was unusually calm during our prayers. Although he could not express it with his limited vocabulary, I believe Charles felt God's peace. Then Sue and Sean had their turn.

We did much of the same morning and afternoon for the next two days. We prayed for God to heal the children, to take away their physical and mental pain. We prayed for Elizabeth to speak and for Charles to understand. We prayed for whatever damage had been done to their bodies to be reversed. We laid our hands on them and prayed and prayed.

At the end of our visit, Pastor Bill and I again had some quiet time. It had been a lovely visit, and I had learned a lot about how to pray. But the children were not miraculously healed as I had hoped and prayed for. Pastor Bill told me that sometimes God healed someone after a single prayer, but often he prayed numerous times before someone was fully healed. I found this both puzzling and encouraging. It was puzzling because I had always viewed healing prayer more or less like a light switch—it either worked or it didn't. It was encouraging because it helped me understand that healing could come in stages.

Pastor Bill pointed out how this was true when Jesus prayed for the blind man in Bethsaida:

I've read that passage many times, but it never truly gripped me until Pastor Bill prayed for Elizabeth. I went to Seattle with all the faith, hope, and love I had in me. A godly man prayed over her, and still we didn't get the healing we had hoped for. Remembering this story from Mark's Gospel helped me hold on to my faith, because it reminded me that healing is sometimes a journey rather than a light switch. This gave me hope for Elizabeth; it meant that our prayers for her weren't in vain simply because we didn't see an immediate result.

Like Robert Frost, Elizabeth's journey is on the road less traveled. Her “Mind” poem at the beginning of the chapter tells us about a deep, dark hole in her that is waiting for the light to seep within. She can't quite put it in words, and neither can I. Slowly, she is emerging.

  
Emergence
  

My senses are awakening

I feel brand-new.

I am on a road less traveled

But there are things I plan to do:

To speak to you.

I'll tell you all the things

You have wanted to know

I promise you the words will flow.

I am feeling new things as I get older. I am noticing changes in my body and thoughts. I am feeling stronger, and I need to speak
.