Unlike So Many Other Evangelicals, Philip Yancey Has Something Real To Say

A bird's-eye view of contemporary evangelicalism.
Philip Yancey | posted 2/28/2007 08:51AM

.......The world is full of pain. The prosperity promised on religious television must exist in some alternate universe from what I encounter as I visit churches in person. For all its faults and failures, the church offers a place to bring wounds and to seek meaning in times of brokenness and struggle.

An older man with a lush beard who walked with a shuffle mumbled to me, "God gave me Parkinson's disease. How can I possibly think he listens to what I have to say in prayer?"

A woman told of praying with desperation during her 19 years in an abusive marriage, "Lord, if someone is killed by a drunk driver, let it be my husband."

I met a woman afflicted with multiple sclerosis, shockingly young, who limped up to tell me she was learning all she could about prayer because the disease was progressing so fast that soon she would be able to do little else.

I heard of suicides, birth defects, children hit by trucks, and teenagers raped. One woman, now an ordained minister, spoke of a dark period after her son died when for 18 months she could not bring herself to pray. She cried out one day, "God, I don't want to die like this, with all communication cut off!" Even so, it took her 6 more months before she could pray again.

In one meeting, a 20-year-old came to the microphone and chided me for not taking literally the Bible's promise about faith that can move mountains. I agreed I needed a larger dose of such childlike faith, yet at the same time, I could not dishonor the pain of suffering people by telling them their faith is somehow defective.

From such souls, I learn that life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived. Prayer offers no ironclad guarantees, just the certain promise that we need not live that mystery alone.