What’s in it for me? Real-life stories that illuminate the power of prayer.
Journalists get to see it all – people at their best and people at their worst.
They document crimes and acts of charity, murders and miraculous rescues.
During her time as a reporter, Harris Faulkner has witnessed people triumphing over impossible odds and seen random tragedies turn innocent lives inside out.
But she’s convinced that there’s a guiding thread running through all these stories: God’s presence.
God has many ways of revealing himself to us.
Some are obvious; others aren’t.
But he’s always there, one prayer away.
This Blink is about the power of prayer.
Over the years, Faulkner has gathered hundreds of moving and illuminating real-life accounts of God’s presence in our lives.
Unfortunately, we can’t tell every one of those stories, so we’ve picked two of our favorites for you.
We express our care and love for others through prayer.
In the Book of Genesis, Joseph spends around twelve years in an underground cell as a prisoner of the Egyptian royal court he once served.
At first, he tries to keep track of time.
He traces the light moving across the ceiling and counts out the hours.
It’s a futile task, though, and he soon gives up.
The days and months become an indistinguishable blur.
Other prisoners come and go, but Joseph remains in his cell.
When it’s dark, he dreams of his childhood – of wide-open fields filled with cattle under vast, starry skies.
When it’s light, he prays.
God, he asks, where are you?
We mostly remember how this Biblical story ends: Joseph is redeemed and becomes one of twelve fathers of Israel.
But we shouldn’t skip over the middle part.
It’s important to remember Joseph’s hopelessness and loneliness.
The moments in which he must have believed God had forgotten him.
That part can teach us a great deal about faith.
Depression is a lot like Joseph’s imprisonment.
It’s an underground cell with a locked door.
A hole with no way out.
In it, we feel abandoned and alone.
Forgotten.
As though no one cares.
Wisconsin mom Tina Zahn knew that feeling.
She had struggled with depression her whole life.
Nothing she had experienced prepared her for postpartum depression, though.
That was a deeper hole than she’d ever known.
Before giving birth to her third child, she’d always been convinced that God was watching over her just as he had watched over Joseph.
After that birth, however, things changed.
The light faded.
She had never felt so alone.
Tina moved in with her mom, but she couldn’t get her out of the hole into which she’d fallen.
She lost track of time and spent her days staring into the distance, wondering why she didn’t feel anything.
“Why can’t you snap out of this?
” her mom asked her one day.
The question seemed to drift through endless time, as though it had come from a million miles away, but it smashed into her mind like a comet.
Suddenly, all her pain and suffering, her endless battle with depression, hit her.
It was overwhelming.
A voice inside her told her to escape.
To run.
And so that’s what she did.
She grabbed her keys and got into her car.
That voice told her where to go: a 200-foot-high concrete bridge over the Fox River in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
She obeyed.
God never forgot Joseph.
And he didn’t forget Tina, either, when she pulled over on the Leo Frigo Memorial Bridge, strode toward the barrier, and jumped on July 19, 2004.
Tina remembers jumping, but she never fell.
She hung in the air, 200 feet above the hard, glassy surface of the river below.
And then she felt a hand clasp her wrist.
Earlier, as Tina ran toward her car, her mom heard her talk about the bridge.
Unable to stop her daughter, she alerted the police.
State trooper Les Boldt was just about to clock off when the call came in.
He knew the risk of trying to stop a “jumper” going off a bridge on his own – that was a job for a team.
But he leapt into his cruiser anyway.
As he reached the bridge, he saw Tina striding toward the barrier.
He called out, but she didn’t listen.
Boldt knew he had to act.
The dash-mounted camera in his patrol car recorded what happened next.
Just before jumping, Tina’s feet caught the lip of the barrier.
For a split second, her momentum was halted.
It was just long enough for Boldt to reach her and grab her arm.
Boldt had called for backup en route, but for 16 desperate seconds he was alone, his body braced against that barrier in a life-and-death struggle against gravity.
And then two other officers arrived.
The first held Tina’s other arm; the second grabbed her legs.
Together, they pulled her back over the barrier to safety.
Lots of things had to go right that day.
Tina’s mom’s mind was clear enough to understand the significance of her daughter’s stated destination.
Officer Boldt made an instant decision to ignore protocol and risk his own life to save Tina’s.
Those actions, though, were part of a larger story.
Looking back, Tina believes that it was the ceaseless prayer of her family and friends that allowed the rescue attempt to succeed.
Those prayers expressed a community’s love and care for Tina.
By praying for her, people were saying that they refused to abandon her.
God heard them.
He also refused to abandon Tina.
Tina’s life changed after that jump.
She still struggles with depression, but she is a stronger woman – and a stronger believer.
Today, she’s a published author, church leader, and an advocate for better education around mental health issues, especially postpartum depression.
Nancy, France.
December 8, 1944.
Prayer helped turn the tide in one of the Second World War’s most significant battles.
Chaplain James O’Neill looks out of his window onto the courtyard of an old military barracks – the temporary headquarters of General Patton’s Third Army.
It’s raining – heavily.
Just like it has been for the last two months.
O’Neill has followed the Third Army through its campaigns in Africa and Italy.
Now, he’s with Patton’s forces in northeastern France.
They’ve liberated the cities of Nancy and Metz.
One more push will take them across the Saar river and into Germany.
But they’re stuck.
The rain has washed away the roads, immobilizing Patton’s tanks.
The dense clouds and fog mean there’s no air support for his infantry.
And every wasted day gives Hitler’s forces a chance to regroup and prepare a counterattack.
The phone rings.
O’Neill lifts the receiver.
It’s Patton.
If we’re to win this war, the general says, we have to do something about this rain.
Does the chaplain have a good prayer for weather?
O’Neill says he’ll check and call back in an hour.
He consults the few prayer books he has on hand.
Nothing.
He’ll have to write something himself.
He places a three-by-five-inch card in a battered typewriter and gets to work.
The prayer he writes goes down in history.
Almighty and most merciful Father, it begins, we humbly beseech thee to restrain these immoderate rains and grant us fair weather for battle.
It continues with a plea: Arm us with thy power so that we may crush the wickedness of our enemies and establish thy justice among men and nations.
An hour later, O’Neill presents the draft to Patton.
The general scans the text, nods in approval, and signs the back of the card where the chaplain has added a Christmas message to the troops.
He’s about to leave when Patton asks him to sit down.
He wants to talk.
Patton, immaculately dressed in a crisply starched uniform, takes his place by the window.
Tall and lean, his appearance reflects years of disciplined living.
Watching the rain fall into the same courtyard O’Neill had been looking at earlier that day, he asks the chaplain a question.
He wants to know how much praying is being done in the Third Army.
O’Neill thinks for a moment.
Not much, he admits.
When they’re fighting, everyone prays.
But just now, when the men are sitting around waiting for something – anything – to happen, God feels more distant.
They’re used to thinking of prayer as something formal.
A ritual.
Something that happens in a special building with a steeple, not in a damp tent in a muddy field outside Nancy.
Patton listens thoughtfully before replying.
There are three ways we can get what we want in this life, he says.
We can plan, we can work, and we can pray.
Military operations take a great deal of planning.
Then it falls to well-trained soldiers to do the work – the fighting.
But neither planning nor fighting alone guarantees victory.
There’s always an unknown factor – the human factor.
It’s how we respond when we are challenged in our work and find ourselves in the midst of a battle.
That decides the course of events.
That’s the difference between success or failure.
Some people say luck makes the difference – sometimes you get a break and that wins a battle.
Others say it’s all psychological.
What it really is, though, Patton concludes, is God.
The Lord has his part in everything.
And that’s where prayer comes into the picture.
Folks back home – the mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters of Patton’s soldiers – have done a lot of praying, he says.
Their prayers have carried the Third Army through the deserts of North Africa, across the sea to Sicily, up the spine of Italy, and into the forests of northeastern France.
Now, though, these men have to pray for themselves, just as Gideon turns to prayer in the Bible when he fights the Israelites’ enemies.
Now, in other words, is the time to ask God to stop these rains.
If we all pray, Patton adds, it will be like “plugging in on a current whose source is in Heaven.
” Prayer completes the circuit.
It is power.
With those words ringing in his ears, O’Neill returns to his office and writes out the final draft of what will become known as Training Letter No.
5.
Over 250,000 copies of the prayer card are printed and distributed to the men of the Third Army on December 11, 1944.
The timing is providential.
On December 16, with the rain still falling, Hitler’s armies launch a massive counterattack against the Allied troops in northeastern France and the Ardennes region of neighboring Belgium.
They attack at lightning speed along the 88-mile front, pushing into what had recently been liberated territories.
The Battle of the Bulge has begun.
In southern Belgium, over 12,000 Allied troops led by Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe are surrounded by a German army numbering over 50,000.
McAuliffe refuses to surrender.
His soldiers’ only hope is a rapid counterstrike by the Third Army, but Patton reckons he can only mobilize his forces if the clouds clear for around 24 hours.
The rain, however, continues to fall as heavily as ever.
Until, one morning – Christmas morning in 1944 – it stops.
The fog lifts.
The skies clear.
It’s a miracle – not even the most optimistic weather reports forecasted anything like it.
The day after Christmas, Patton’s troops advance under wave after wave of Allied air support.
On December 26, they break through German lines and lift the siege of Bastogne.
Even more miraculously, the good weather holds all the way into late January.
Finally able to deploy the full strength of their armor, the Allies are able to decide the Battle of the Bulge in their favor on January 28, 1945.
The German counteroffensive has failed.
The Nazi war machine is broken.
The war will be over in fewer than four months.
O’Neill meets Patton one last time during the war – this time in Luxembourg.
It’s a few days after the Battle of the Bulge.
Seeing the chaplain, the general marches over and smiles.
“Well, Padre, our prayers worked.
I knew they would.
” He then gives O’Neill a crack on the side of his steel helmet with his riding crop – his way of saying, “Well done!
We are never alone.
Even when we feel that we have been forgotten, or that the odds are impossibly stacked against us, God is always there for us.
Final Summary
Prayer is how we reach out to him – not just for ourselves, but also for the people we love and the causes we cherish.