It is a humbling and holy and mysterious thing to be prayed over, to have a hand lifted to God on your behalf, and you standing, or kneeling, or perhaps lying ill or dying or hoping to die, mute for that moment, naked in your need. Maybe it is this nakedness that keeps us from seeking it out, which is perhaps why we offer it so seldom either. To offer to pray over someone is to become almost as vulnerable as when we receive it, because the person you accost can say No, or worse, reluctantly accept it while thinking you a freak or an interloper. So instead we promise to pray for someone, and sometimes we even remember to keep those prayer promises.

Prayer is a mystery to me because it doesn’t seem that God needs our help in healing the world, or even that he is concerned with doing so. He calls whom he will call, and heals whom he will heal, and doesn’t consult us about it. And yet we are enjoined to pray, and even promised that the prayers of the righteous accomplish much, though much isn’t defined. I’ve not yet cultivated the sanctification necessary to consider a pediatric burn unit and tell myself that God materializes miracles whenever the righteous pray, or to expound such a theology by dint of pretending pediatric burn units don’t exist. I pray sometimes because I ache for the presence of God, and other times because he is here, in the midst of my family, in the midst of me in my brokenness and need, and my prayer is simply: Thank you, over and over.

Prayer is a drawing close to God, and perhaps that is its purpose, or one of its purposes. We want to believe, when we bow our heads or perhaps when we whisper his name in our minds, that we are coming into the presence of him who will heal the broken things, who will bring justice and rest. To be prayed over, then, is to be taken by the hand when we feel we can’t walk alone, and guided into the presence of holiness. No wonder we often weep when someone does this for us, and what a pity that we don’t do it for one another more.

I thought about all this in church yesterday, as we rushed from the nursery, where we had been spelling the on-duty folks so they could receive communion, back to the sanctuary, because my wife didn’t want to miss the benediction. Sometimes we sense the worship within our worship, don’t we, the yearning in a pew neighbor’s voice as she sings a hymn, or an infant’s contented sigh in the midst of a sermon? I saw it when we slipped into the back of the sanctuary, the pastor’s hands raised to invoke the blessing and peace of God, all of us undeserving including the pastor himself, and my wife with her head down, eyes closed, palms upturned as if God’s blessing is the purest rainwater that you can catch in your hands if you will only be ready to receive it, and me standing there loving her and thinking that maybe it isn’t so far from the truth, this notion of God’s blessing as rain, and knowing in that moment that it quenches even the most parched of hearts.

All of this coming from one sin-filled man raising his hands over other sinners, this prayer uttered from human lips in the presence of world-weary ears to a God who mysteriously listens and, though he does not bend to our wishes, works miracles all the same. He works miracles we have not thought to ask. We haven’t thought to ask them because they are too small and too wonderful all at once, like the miracle that left me searching for him the rest of the day in the smallest places, in the squeal of my infant, in the sunlight on turning leaves, in an upturned palm.