What was the name of the blind beggar Jesus healed near Jericho?

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Progressive Christian

Last updated on: May 23, 2008 at 1:11 pm by Cathleen Falsani

2008-05-23T13:11:00-07:00 Cathleen Falsani

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GODSTUFF

PRAYER, HUH! GOOD GOD, Y’ALL. TELL ME WHAT IT’S GOOD FOR?

“Do your prayers get answered?”

That was the first line of a note waiting for me Thursday morning when I logged on to my e-mail account. It was a response from a friend who had told me, a day earlier, how he was anxious about an impending, crucial business meeting

I told my friend I’d be praying for him. He thanked me, but insisted he didn’t want to bother the Almighty.

“How do you know your prayers get answered anyway?” he asked. “What do you think when they don’t get an answer? Is no answer the answer? Doesn’t it trivialize prayer to pray for, say, a parking spot in the same lineup as praying for someone who is sick?”

In a series of exchanges that followed, I explained, as I understand it, that there is nothing too big or too seemingly trivial for God to care about; that prayer is us having a conversation with our Maker and that I didn’t think we could say anything that would make God stare blankly or throw up God’s hands and storm out of the room.

And I believe all of that.

But it got me thinking: Why do we pray?

Last week, I wrote about Kim Kalicky, a nurse, mom of four and wife of a Chicago Fire Department paramedic who has been battling Hodgkin’s lymphoma for several years. Not long before Christmas ’07, after a period of remission, the cancer came back with a vengeance, and Kim desperately needs a bone marrow transplant.

On May 14, there was a marrow donor drive at Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, in part with the hope of finding a match for Kim and several other area women. The drive was a success — 101 people turned up to give tissue samples (from a cheek swab) to an international registry of more than 8 million donors.

The day after the donor drive, Kim had an appointment to see her oncologist, Dr. Patrick Stiff, director of the bone marrow transplant program at Loyola. Her physicians had decided that radiation treatment to reduce the size of new tumors along her spine was too risky for Kim to undergo and were recommending she begin an intense five-day in-patient course of continuous, intravenous chemotherapy.

Kim wasn’t thrilled. But, irrepressibly plucky woman that she is, she resigned herself to this new twist in her long battle with cancer.

As Dr. Stiff left the examination room, Kim’s transplant coordinator was waiting for him in the hallway. A moment later, the doctor poked his head back in the door and said, “You have a match!” Kim recalled earlier this week.

“A match! A perfect match!” she squeaked at me over the phone, her voice cracking with emotion. “I was jumping up and down and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I did both.”

The donor hadn’t been one of the 101 kind souls who turned up at Loyola for the marrow drive last week. It was a different match from the international registry.

The timing may have been purely coincidental, but it sure felt providential to Kim and those of us who have been praying for her.

“It’s an ideal donor and matched perfectly,” Still told me. “We each have a bunch of tissue antigens that mark us as being a unique human being, and if we have an identical twin, those marks are the same. But genetically there is a finite number of these tissue antigens, and kind of like the Lotto, somebody wins occasionally and cashes in on the big prize.”

Now, Kim isn’t out of the woods. She weathered the five-day chemo cycle well, with fatigue and a little pain, but without any debilitating nausea.

Doctors want to get the cancer under control before a transplant is attempted, and Kim may have to endure another round of in-patient chemotherapy before she’s deemed ready to go. And the donor has to undergo further examination to make sure everything’s kosher for a transplant.

A tiny woman with enormous, staggering faith, Kim is certain whatever happens next will be a blessing. While her donor wasn’t found at last week’s donor drive, someone else’s might have been.

“I am so blessed,” she says. “God is good. All the time. Just trust God.”

Would things have turned out differently if people hadn’t been praying for Kim to find a donor?

I have no idea. No one does.

Still, we pray.

Some say it’s a fool’s errand, but I don’t think so.

In the 1993 biographical film “Shadowlands,” about C.S. Lewis’ relationship with his late-in-life wife, Joy Gresham, who is battling cancer, there is a scene about prayer that I often ponder.

When Joy’s disease goes into remission, a clergy friend tells Lewis God is answering his prayers.

“That’s not why I pray,” Lewis says. “I pray because I can’t help myself — the need flows out of me. It doesn’t change God; it changes me.”

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