1. IS OUR LIFE REALLY THE RESULT OF A CAREFULLY
   WRITTEN SCRIPT THAT WE OURSELVES WRITE
   PRIOR TO INCARNATING?  

The biblical answer is a qualified no.  Only a few key events in our lives are divinely foreordained, perhaps only one.  God always respects our freedom, including our freedom to make bad decisions that thwart or delay divine support of our ordained destiny.  Key events in the lives of my brother and myself dramatically illustrate this point.  I will share our story if there is interest.  For now I will confine myself to 3 biblical examples:

(a) In God’s call to Jeremiah, He declares: “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I have appointed you a prophet to the nations (Jeremiah 1:4).”  But in the fulfilment of this call, a whiny Jeremiah makes mistakes and often complains about how God handles issues.  

(b) Hezekiah, one of Israel’s greatest kings, becomes mortally ill and is told by the prophet Isaiah that God decrees this illness as the vehicle for his predestined death (see Isaiah 38).   But in a moment of weakness, Hezekiah bitterly intercedes with God to extend his life.   Through Isaiah, God reveals that the script has now been changed and that Hezekiah will be granted 15 more years.  But the moral of the story is this: be careful what you ask for; you just may get it.  In those 15 years, Hezekiah gives birth to a son, Manasseh, who turns out to be one of Israel’s most evil kings.  In retrospect, it seems preferable that Hezekiah would have gracefully accepted his death at the scripted time.  That way, Israel would have been spared the evil reign of Manasseh.

(c) The story of Joseph is the story of how immoral acts that God never intended were blended into a divine plan to preserve Israel’s ancestors and save Egypt from mass starvation in a time of famine. Joseph's brothers were rightfully displeased by his egotistical flaunting of his self-aggrandizing dreams.  But they were wrong to sell him into slavery and then lie about it to their father Jacob.  Still, in Joseph’s later dramatic reunion with his brothers, he implies that God molded the consequences of these immoral acts into a glorious purpose.  As Joseph puts it,  “Even though you intended to harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people (Genesis 50:20).”  

The notion of a partially scripted life can best be understood in term of a chess analogy in which God is likened to a grandmaster.  A grandmaster playing a novice has no control over the novice’s moves.  But he knows he can control the game to a limited extent and that the final outcome is certain.  By sheer luck the novice can occasionally create unanticipated obstacles and can even pout and refuse to move.  The grandmaster can even occasionally let the novice win to build up his confidence and learn some lessons.   So it is with God.

The notion of a carefully written life script is undermined by the oft-repeated prophetic insight that the future is seldom fixed.   God often tells Israel that because she has sinned (e.g. by ignoring social justice or chronically worshiping false gods), a certain divine judgment must be carried out.  But  when the people repent, God suspends the threat, the purpose of which, after all, was merely to induce spiritual transformation and reform.  In this respect, conventional notions of divine omnipotence and omniscience are later philosophical  distortions of the Hebraic mentality.  The biblical God often encourages the perspective that His mind can be “changed” by loving intercessory prayer.

To help us fulfill aspects of our destiny, God takes advantage of His perspective “outside of time.”  It is important to note what Paul DOES NOT teach about predestination.  He does not teach, “Those God predestined He also foreknew;”  Rather, Paul teaches, “Those God foreknew He also predestined (Romans 8:29).”  Foreknowledge precedes predestination.  God knows how I will abuse my free will and make poor choices.  That foreknowledge helps God intervene to ensure that I
have a chance to fulfill at least some important aspects of my foreordained life script.  

2. WHY WOULD HE ALLOW SUCH AWFUL TRAGEDIES
   LIKE THE TSUNAMI THAT TAKE SUCH A HUGE
   TOLL IN LIVES AND SUFFERING?  OR MIGHT WE
   HAVE TO SHED OUR BELIEF THAT GOD IS
   NECESSARILY "LOVING" AT LEAST IN TERMS OF
   HOW WE UNDERSTAND THAT WORD?

I will address Roger’s second question here first.  God makes it clear that His ways and thoughts are very different than our ways and thoughts (Isaiah 55:8-9).  God is in effect saying, “Beware of excessive anthropomorphism." Practically speaking, we should limit our claim that God loves us to what God has done for us in history (e g. sending Jesus) and what God promises to do for us in both this life and the next.  Still, if God willed the recent tsunami, then any claim to His loving character is open to serious challenge.

But I don’t believe God willed that tsunami.  It is well known that the Bible teaches that at creation God brought order out of primordial chaos.  What is less known is this:  the Bible also teaches that God has never gained complete control over the forces of chaos.  The Bible is not a scientific book.  Its teaching about chaos is a poetic way of saying that God set the laws of nature in motion at creation, but does not micro-manage the operation of those laws.  Chaos has nothing to do with the demonic. Apparently the Creator’s penchant  for free creatures beyond His control requires a universe that He does not completely control.  Ecclesiastes 9:11 is a good example of this biblical teaching about chaos: “The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor favor to the skilful; but all are victims of time and chance (Ecclesiastes 9:11).”  At the same time, God reserves the right to empower us to fulfill aspects of our destiny and to mitigate the destructive power of chaos [blind chance} through prayer, faith, and love.  Thus Paul can insist: “We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him (Romans 8:28).”  Notice the implication that “all things” might be working against us, but that God is “plugging away” for the good, trying to salvage a wonderful purpose from often horrid disasters that He never intended.  

3. WHERE DOES GOD FIT IN?

If there is no careful script for my life, then to what extent is God willing to help me discover spiritual truth or, more specifically, the truth about astral exploration?  A clue to this mystery can be found in the most influencial NDE ever reported, that of George Ritchie, now a psychiatrist.  Ritchie’s NDE inspired Raymond Moody to do his NDE research and Moody became the major catalyst for modern interest in NDEs.  The Being of Light identifies Himself to George as Jesus and takes him on a tour of hellish and heavenly astral planes.  George offers a description of one such astral plane that is reminiscent of Focus 27: e.g. “Enormous buildings stood in a beautiful sunny park that reminded me somewhat of a well-planned university.”  The technology on display  in these buildings created an atmosphere  “brimming with the excitement of great discovery.”  Yet this was not the true Heaven.  As good as these people were, they were not permitted to see Jesus.  Nor were denizens of the lower planes permitted to see Him.  Only in a much higher heaven was recognition of Jesus’ presence permitted.  This insight helps explain a discrepancy between Swedenborg’s astral adventures and those of modern adepts like Bob Monroe, Bruce Moen, and Robert Bruce. Swedenborg is routinely overwhelmed by Christ’s presence during his travels, but modern adepts rarely encounter Him or God.  Not that Swedenborg was superior to these modern adepts.  But unlike them, it was a top priority for Swedenborg to encounter and learn about the astral presence of Christ and its significance.  We tune in to only those astral frequencies for which we are ready at a deep level of being.  

Enormous variations in our spiritual attunement account for the many discrepancies in adepts’ perspectives about the structure of the astral realms.  If only a few key events in our lives are foreordained, then the rest of our spiritual discoveries depend to a considerable extent on our initiative, insight, and creativity.  So where does God fit in to these varied quests?  A clue can be found in the biblical God’s reluctance to reveal the full-blown truth in one magical revelatory episode.
Let me explain.  

Many of us are troubled by the capital punishment prescribed in the Pentateuch for sins like adultery (Leviticus 20:10).  But when Jesus encounters a Pharisaic attempt to enforce this penalty, He shames them into desisting with His famous challenge, “Let Him who is without sin cast the first stone (John 8:7).”  What does this imply about Jesus’ attitude to the severity of the Pentateuchal penal code?   Jesus recognizes that many of these Mosaic laws are cultural distortions of God’s will.  This point is clear from Jesus’ statement: "Moses only wrote this commandment only because of your hardness of heart (Mark 10:5).”  The commandment in question is Moses’s law that a Jew can divorce his wife for any  "indecency" (Deuteronomy 24:1-4).  Jesus’ contemporaries conceived “indecency” to include a woman’s growing wrinkles or burning dinner! Jesus’ response is that God wants us to enter marriage with the idea that it is a lifelong partnership.  But Jesus also believes that life is too complex to be governed by legalism. So he presents His teaching on divorce not as an absolute, but as a guideline for which there are exceptions (e.g. Matthew 5:32; 19:8).  The important point is this: Jesus makes it clear that much of the Law of Moses attributes principles to God that do not accurately reflect divine values.  To correct his problem, God would not exempt the Jews from the hard work of upgrading their spiritual quest and self-awareness by their own efforts.  The same can be said, I think, about astral exploration.      

The most dramatic expression of how cultural bias prevents an accurate picture of God’s revelatory impulses from being drawn surfaces in God’s stunning confession in Jeremiah 7:22-23:

“For I did not speak to your fathers, or command them in the day I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices But this is what I commanded them, saying, "Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and you will be my people.”

God’s confession contradicts the impression created by the Pentateuch that Moses’ lawgiving efforts were entirely authorized by God.  In antiquity sacrifices were so universal that one can speak of a Jungian sacrifice archetype embedded in the human unconscious.  God simply used an already existing priestly practice as the framework for imparting insights that were more important to Him.  Thus, Jesus makes it clear that God offers revelation within an outmoded Jewish legalism with the expectation that this legalism will implement key loving princinples: e.g.

“However you want people to treat you, so treat them, for this sums up the law and the Prophets (Matthew 7:12).

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.  This is the great and foremost commandment.  And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets (Matthew 22:37-40).”  

Jesus reminds the Pharisees that morality is revealed to serve the best interests of people, not vice versa.  Thus, He reduces the countless Jewish Sabbath laws to just one principle: “The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath (Mark 1:27).”  And he reduces the countless Jewish dietary and purity laws to just one principle: “There is nothing outside the man which, going into him, can defile him, but  the things that proceed out of the man are what defile the man (Mark 7:15).”  For Jesus, life is too complex to be governed by a rigid set of moral rules.  So when our best interest clashes with moral precepts the precepts can be set aside.  

Similarly, the prophetic role implies that religious doctrines are only valuable insofar as they promote a loving spiritual consciousness.  When doctrines fail to serve this purpose, they are temporarily nullified by God!  For example, Israel relied on ritual sacrifices in the Temples as their means of securing divine pardon.  But when their rituals no longer promote loving justice, God suspends them and the doctrines that support them: e.g.  

“I reject your festivals, nor do I delight in your solemn assemblies.   Even though you offer up burnt offerings..., I will not accept them;...Take away from me the noise of your songs;...But let justice roll down like rivers and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream (Amos 5:21-24).”

Note God’s sarcasm about food and drink sacrifices in Psalm 50:13-14: “Shall I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of male goats?  Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving.”  

"That foreknowledge helps God intervene to ensure that I have a chance to fulfill at least some important aspects of my foreordained life script."

Hi Don-

Thanks for your thoughtful response.  My problem is, if we accept the premise that God  on occasion intervenes in our lives, it then opens up a whole host of conundrums (conundra?).

How does He pick and choose?  Presumably all of us have a role to fulfill but many of us are cut short.  The tsunami is a good example because of its magnitude, but any newspaper in any town will have stories of smaller but nevertheless tragedies all the same to those affected.  It never ceases to amaze me that a person will express gratitude to God for having missed a flight that crashes and kills all aboard, as if God didn't much care about the hundreds of other folks who showed up at the airport in time.

Personally I've concluded that God is unknowable and all attempts to do so are going to fall short of the mark.  It seems as if the only way He is described is in human terms....angry and full of retribution at times, loving and caring at others.  Regardless, there is always the element of human emotions  attritutable to Him because that's the only way we can hope to understand.

A close friend of mine, a Jehovah Witness, tells me that Jehovah is a jealous God and demands that we call Him by his proper name. As if God cares about what name to be called.   A human trait for sure, and therefore we ascribe that same trait to Him. 

One time as we were sharing a drink, I started to give a short toast to our friendship, but he quickly withdrew his glass.  Seems that by so doing I was about to dishonor Jehovah, since I was giving tribute to a human being instead of my friend's God.  Same reason btw that they don't celebrate birthdays or anniversaries. 

So after many years of wondering and sometimes agonizing over it, I have given up and just figure that God "is" and let it go at that.  (I can't even imagine a God that desires to be worshipped, but then that's a whole other thing.)

Thanks again for the biblical lesson.  I look forward to your post on channeling.

Roger

Hi all,  I haven't posted on this site in quite a few years but have returned from time to time when Bruce has written a new book just to see if others got as much out of it as I have and to see how others are progressing on our quest of understanding. 

I would like to thank Beserk and others for the pleasent experience of theological / metaphysical discussions stated from love. 

Too many times have people defended their belief systems with a sword instead of a loaf of bread and a glass of wine.   Its refreshing to see intelligent discussions from different points of view.

Thank you all.

Roger,

Well, let me take a brief stab at your 4th question about how God might "pick and choose"  who lives and who dies in events like the recent tsunami.   Of oourse, the honest answer is that I don't know.  But 3 factors prevent this from being debilitating to my faith.

(1) As you suggest, sometimes we just don't listen to divine impulses intended to warn us of impending danger.  Years ago, I was driving home from a day's college teaching and I sleepily stopped at a light with no care in the world.  My view of crossing traffic was obstructed by parked trucks.  When the light turned green and I stepped on the gas, an inner voice yelled, "Stop!"  Startled, I put on the brakes just as a large truck came barreling through the red light.   My car would have done its impression of a pizza if I hadn't stopped.  I guess I hadn't yet fulfilled my life purpose.   

(2) God wants neither completely robotic humans nor a completely robotic universe.  The Bible teaches that God controls neither our free decisions nor the outcomes of natural laws.  In other words, He doesn't control the forces of chaos either in our lives or in nature.  Perhaps this sometimes means that some of us don't get to fulfill our life purpose.  But within the context of His self-imposed limitations, God does occasionally respond to our cries for help and to our need for protection and healing.

For example, last week my Dad told me his pastor was going to quit because of a growth in his throat that made him mute.  The growth had been thoroughly examined by invasive medical procedures and the inference drawn was that surgery was urgently needed.  But first the church elders anointed the pastor with oil and prayed for his healing.  The growth vanished and his voice returned to normal  The doctor had no explanation for this miracle and the pastor joyfully shared his healing testimony a couple of Sundays ago. 

The mystery of suffering cannot be eliminated, but its core question can be constructively rethought.  The crucial question is this: within His self-imposed limitations, to what extent is God willing or able to honor our faith and prayers for His intervention?

(3) The third factor applies the insights drawn from my "Agenda" post about the distribution of pain, suffering, and hardship.  From God's perspective, the value of our free will is directly porportional to the strength of our incentive to choose contrary to His will.  This incentive is strongest in a moral order in which pain is distributed unfairly rather than evenly or fairly.  This insight is relevant to your question about why a loving God might permit the indiscriminately large loss of life in the recent tsunami.  If God prevented such events from occuring, the distribution of pain would be more rationally comprehensible.  But then the incentive to choose contrary to God's will would be somewhat diminished and God's existence would be more strongly confirmed.  As the Russian parable cited in my "Agenda" post tries to make clear,  God's purposes in self-disclosure may be undermined by an overwhelming confirmation of His existence. 

But as you honestly point out, the real issue for you is your skepticism about both the existence of a loving God and our postmortem survival.  If you could be convinced of the former, then surely it would be easier for you to accept the latter.  Therefore, I will shift gears and try to address both issues.  Since you asked about the miracles in one of my UMC churches, I will begin by describing the 3 miracles that had the greatest impact on me.

Don-

Thanks for posting these stories.  Reminds me of something I saw on this website.  Below is the link and the story is "Cathy's Verified Contact".  It's a fascinating story although I take issue with it being characterized as a verified contact.  It could also be an example of an amazing coincidence. 

http://www.afterlife-knowledge.com/what_saying.html

I look forward to your next post.  I consider you to be a valued member of this board and hope you'll stick around.

Roger

Dear Polly,

Thanks for sharing your reaction.  You are right: God clearly has an exit strategy of varying lifespans for each of us.  The question is whether those lifespans can be shortened by the forces of chaos over which God does not have complete control.  We must learn to know what we don't or can't know and to become more accepting of unsolvable mysteries.   The purpose of my post is to try to clear away the mental debris that prevents the sufferer from humbly bowing before the mystery and getting on with their lives.

Don

DATES WITH DESTINY

We've been discussing whether any of our life experiences are divinely scripted.  I want to share 3 experiences that bolster my conviction that at least some key events are predestined.

This date with destiny arrived at an anxious period of my life.  I was in my last year of Princeton Seminary's MDiv program.  I had recently changed my plans and now wanted admittance to the Harvard doctoral program in Scripture and Judaism.  But I lacked the requisite specialized courses and two of my friends' applications to this program had been rejected.  I was assured that I had no chance either.  But what would I do then?

One night [yet another] Roger came to my dorm room.  Roger and I had taken a class together and had once had lunch with a group of guys in the cafeteria.  Beyond this, I didn't know if he cared whether I lived or died.  Yet that night he came enveloped in an atmospere of PUL.  [Both Roger and I are straight guys!]  He knew I was anxious about my Harvard application.  He told me that he had been praying for me and had received assurance that I'd be accepted.  I normally experience such pious assurances as well-intentioned wishful thinking.  But this was different:
in the presence of that PUL Roger's assurance became my own.  I thanked him, but to this day Roger has no idea how grateful I am for his prayers.

Shortly thereafter, I had a date with destiny tinged with intrigue and synchronicity.  Ann was my friend John's girlfriend--or so I assumed.  I liked her.  She had been a source of comfort after news of a friend's untimely death.  But unknown to me, John had just broken off the relationship.  Ann seemed to assume that John and I had conversed about the impending break-up, but we had not.  An anonymous caller had told her that she was unstable and unfit for seminary.  Evidently the caller sounded just like me.  To my horror, she stormed over to my room and angrily accused me of making this call.  I was in despair.  How does one defend oneself against such a  false charge?

In the heat of her harangue, the pay phone rang in the hall.  It was for me.  It was the Harvard professor who controlled the Dead Sea Scrolls.  He called to tell me I'd been accepted into Harvard's doctoral program with a nice scholarship.  How awesome was the shift in my emotional state from despair to a powerful sense of God's loving and vindicating presence!  When I returned to my room, Ann angrily asked, "Who was that?"  When I told her, she was stunned and her expression became uncertain.  During the ensuing awkward pause, she suddenly asked, "Are you all right?"  I said, "Sure, why?"  She replied, "Just look at your pants!"  Blood was gushing from the palm of my right hand and covering my pants.  Now I'm not Catholic, and so, have never believed in the stigmata (the bleeding hands of Jesus, first experienced by St. Francis).  But Ann evidently did.  She saw the timing of my Harvard acceptance and my stigmatic experience as signs of my innocence and sheepishly excused herself.  This left me wondering what might have caused such bleeding.
I went to my door to see if I might have cut my hand when I opened it, but was never able to come up with a satisfactory explanation.  This whole episode overwhelmingly confirmed for me that God's script for my life at least included doctoral studies in early Christianity and Judaism.

(2) My parents and younger brother D (age 18) helped me move to Cambridge.  D was happy for me, but sad about his own life.  He worked hard, but his high school grades were mediocre.  After they dropped me off, my Dad and D went on a bus tour of New York City.   D was deeply moved by all the derelicts and homeless people he saw in the streets.   Just then, he received his call to be a doctor. 

When he returned home, he went to the Med School, announced his new intention, and asked for more information.  The admissions officer took one look at his grades and laughed: "Forget it!  your grades are low and admissions to Med School are highly competitive."  D snapped, "Grades won't be a problem!"  False bravado?  Hardly.  D sailed through the honors microbiology program with straight A+s.  I was delirious with joy for him.  His date with destiny had suddenly made him a brain.

When D entered Med School, he bought me a Moving Star sapphire ring for Christmas.  Because this gift stems from the most transformative period of D's life, it ranks as my most treasured possession.  D is currrently practicing medicine in Colorado.  I often wonder whether the exorcism he had performed at age 16 was part of his calling to be a healer [On this see my "Agenda" post.].

(3) I've saved my most important life experience for last.  I was 16 and well on my way to becoming an agnostic.  I was detecting problems with biblical authority and  was growing increasingly cynical about the charismatic manifestations I was witnessing in my Pentecostal church.  For example, I had experienced the intense ecstasy of speaking in tongues.  I knew this experience was potent enough to cure heroine addiction.   But I now thought my own experiences of this could be explained naturally as the product of wishful thinking and manipulation.

But I was going to give God one last chance.  I went to Manhattan Beach Camp in Western Manitoba.  After the evening services, people would tarry at the front and get swept away by ecstasy.  But not me!  Empty and disillusioned, I went for a long walk in the country.  I told God I was at a crossroads.  If He wanted my allegiance, He had to bless me in a convincing fashion, almost against my will.  I felt that this demand bordered on blasphemy, but I was desperate.  That evening, I fasted for the evening meal and put the money reserved for it in the offering plate.  As usual, I knelt without emotion at the front after the service.  Eventually, everyone left but me.  My heart felt like stone.  My fists were clenched in my determination not to give way to a contrived experience sparked by my pressing need.

It was then that I was immersed in the most transforming experience of my life.  One moment I was defiant and resistant, the next I was swept up in what I can only describe as the "wind" of the Holy Spirit.  Acts 2 mentions that the early church's first outpouring of the Spirit was preceded by "a rushing mightly wind," but I had never taken this image seriously.  Now I had to!

Seemingly against my will, I was possessed by the Holy Spirit.  With each passing moment I was engulfed by wave after wave of liquid love.  The intensity of this love increased dramatically with each wave until it became so powerful I feared I might die.  I felt as if my ego might at any second be absorbed in the divine mind.  It is heart-breaking to even try to describe it.  I can only say that the experience of the sweetness and goodness of God's love was over 100 times more powerful than anything I've experienced before or since.  The whole episode lasted about a half hour.

Soon spectators started trickling into the deserted amphitheatre and quiety sat down to watch me.  I asked one of them why she was there and she said, "Because your face is glowing!"  A stoic Lutheran minister approached me to ask if I would lay hands on him.  He was visiting out of curiosity and wasn't into this sort of thing.  But the instant I touched him it was as if I had electricuted him!  He exploded in other tongues and was enveloped by ecstasy.  At that moment, if you had brought me a blind person, I would have had no doubt that he would have been healed.

But there is a sobering dark side to this adventure.  When it ended, I tried in vain to recreate it in my mind.  My memory bank had nothing with which to compare it.  The contrast with normal consciousness was depressing.  And then there was the disturbing message that the Spirit impressed upon me during the experience.  The Spirit told me that my theology was flawed, but it was simply not His way to dictate the truth to me.  He said that living the right questions was more important for me than believing any answers.
He encouraged me to make it my lifelong quest to probe His mystery.  He even gave me the impression that He wanted me to forget about speaking in tongues now and to have the denomination in which I was reared.  These messages were not dictated to me.  They came in what Robert Monroe would call a rote, a ball of thought that needed to be contemplated and unraveled.  This event has defined the course of my life.

After this experience I became clairvoyant in many ways for several years.  For example, I often knew when certain people would die.  Once when I was about to leave my apartment, an inner voice yelled, "Sit down, you're going to hear about a death that will affect your life."  At once the phone rang.  It was the chair of my Theology department, saying, "The professor who was supposed to teach the summer grad course in Scripture was just found dead in bed, and you're the only one around who can teach his course.  Will you do it?"  I gladly accepted this assignment. 

On another occasion, I was playing bridge with some Education professors.  A colleague, Joe, had just died of cancer and his widow, Elie (another Education professor) was in mourning.  After the bridge, I suddenly found myself saying to Paul (the Dean), "Elie has been contacted by Joe and is wondering if her experience is real.  Tell her I can assure her that it is indeed real."  Curious, Paul contacted Elie and told her what I had said.  She confirmed that she and her family had just returned from Pennsylvania.  In the car, the family erupted into laughter for the first time since Joe's funeral.  Ellie was in the back seat, when she suddenly had a waking vision of Joe from the waist up--laughing. 
He telepathically communicated to her, "This is the way I want to see you.  I'm OK.  Don't worry about me."  Elie had told no one of this experience.  These examples could be multiplied. 

Don

Freebird,

Your questions here are so profound and important that I must weigh them carefully before responding.  A new post might be advisable.  But let me make a suggestion right now.  I go on long walks of 7.2 miles about 5 days a week.  I will designate a certain section of this journey the Freebird section and devote it to prayer for your needs.  Would you mind detailing your afflictions in a private message?  I ask this because, if there's one thing I've learned about prayer, it's the importance of engaging the imagination.  Jesus taught how to do this, but that's another story.  The more concretely I can imagine your need the easier it is to pray with believing faith.  In your private message, let me know what the doctors have told you to grant or deny you hope.

Before my cancer (now cured), I pastored a UCC church for 3 years and had a weekly prayer meeting.  When requests came for people I'd never met, I requested a picture, if possible, for the same reason I'm asking you for more details in a private post. 

Let me give you one example that illustrates both the promise and the frustrating mystery of prayer.
One lady in our group brought 3 Jewish people I'd never met to our attention --Elaine, Larry, and baby Jack.  Elaine had metasthetized cancer.  Larry had a malignant brain tumor, and baby Jack had a third of his brain missing and so his death was considered imminent.  We passed their pictures around and prayed for them regularly.  Elaine's cancer went into remission, Larry's tumor vanished, and baby Jack revived, was able to leave the hospital and is still flourishing.

When I left the church, the prayer meeting was cancelled.   Soon Elaine developed a different serious illness and Larry's tumor returned.  I don't know, but I suspect that they needed the continuing support of a prayer meeting.  I've seen this pattern before. 

Give me a week to respond to your questions.

Don