When Praying Isn’t Enough 
Written By Siobhan Jansen, Elevate Christian Disability Trust Staff
We all want to be healed, whether it’s emotionally, spiritually, mentally or physically. It might not be visible to others. It might be a deep hurt or a spiritual scar that’s never properly healed. It might come from a relationship breakdown or past trauma. It might be a deep yearning of a prayer that we feel is yet unanswered – or maybe it’s the pain of a prayer that’s been answered with a no or not yet. It might be a disease or physical condition that’s causing pain and suffering. It might be the loss of a loved one.
Prayer is a powerful thing. God hears our cries and is compassionate. Healing services, corporate prayer or small group prayer-chains guided by biblical principles can be an effective foundation for true healing and support. However, it should not and cannot simply stop there.
Romans 12:15 calls us to grieve with those who are grieving and rejoice with those who are rejoicing. This is not fulfilled if we only ever, passively send a text of ‘I’m sorry, I’ll be praying for you.’ God’s compassion and mercy for His children is in part, His provision of Christian community. But for this to work, we, as His body, need to be listening for and following His will. Being His hands and His feet. Serving one another. We are called to sacrificial love, to pick up our cross and carry it. Believing that a one-off prayer has fulfilled your bodily duty is false.
There may be occasions when we are called to sit beside a person, pray for them and then never see them again. Or sometimes praying is genuinely the only support you can offer. Yet this should not be the norm within our churches. We need to be actively loving one another.
To actively love another person, involves reaching out to them if we haven’t seen them at church for a while, and this should not just be the role of the pastoral team, it needs to be all church members. Whether your church is large or small, individual members should be encouraged to reach out to others in love.
A healing or a prayer service can be good, but it’s even better when needs are followed up. Someone’s grief or pain, even if it is transcended with peace, rarely goes away overnight. It’s a journey and one that is made lonelier if people don’t reach out.
On a side note, when a person is grieving or not coping, asking them to reach out and make decisions on who to ask for what help can often be too overwhelming. So rather than saying, ‘call me if you need anything’, try saying what you’re willing to help with and when (such as looking after the kids for an hour on the weekend, or being able to provide some baking).
When someone who is hurting is prayer for and surrounded by love in the moment of a prayer session, but then doesn’t receive any further support, encouragement or acknowledgement, how then are they meant to feel loved?
Jesus showed us time and again, how to actively love one another. He didn’t just say to someone “I’ll pray for you” and leave it at that, Jesus would reach out and welcome the marginalised and the hurting, praying for them yes, but also provided for their physical and emotional needs too. A good example is of the story of the woman who was bleeding for 12 years, which can be found in 3 of the gospels. Because of the woman’s condition, she would have been shunned by society. By touching Jesus’ cloak, her physical condition was cured, but Jesus knowing that she had touched him, stopped what he was doing and in amongst the large crowd surrounding him, he looked for her. When she approached him, he acknowledged her and he talked to her in public. For a woman who had been shunned by people for so long, this would have been a significant act for her, it also demonstrated to those around her how they too were to treat her. In doing so, Jesus healed her emotional wounds too.
So let us follow Jesus’ example of actively showing love to one another.