Wholly Healthy: COVID Prayers

Edwin Leap

Edwin Leap

Edwin Leap is an emergency physician and writer from Walhalla. Read more at EdwinLeap.com

I write this month to call my readers to action. I sat in our church service on Sunday at LifePoint Church in Seneca, as Pastor Blake Pitts urged us to a deeper life of desperate prayer. I realized how many people in my world need just that.

As the pandemic still burns through the population, we seem to be a nation at war. We are at war over vaccinations, restrictions and alternative therapies. Right and left argue over the role of government and over who can be trusted to give guidance to the populace. The church itself is home to many of these disagreements, as there is no small amount of skepticism among Christians.

However, in the center of all of this division are the patients and the healthcare workers. I have written before that I understand much of the doubt and anger over the handling of the pandemic. But as someone who is indeed on the front line of the suffering, I can say that the death and the suffering are all too real. And that those tasked with caring for the afflicted, from housekeepers to physicians, are simply, totally exhausted.

There is a desperation and a hopelessness that is palpable. It looks out from the eyes of those gasping for breath. It pours out from the fearful questions asked by their loved ones, who can spend precious little time with them. It is evident in the tears, and even the postures, of those doing the hard work of caring for the sick and the dying.

We are the ones telling people that their fathers or mothers, husbands, wives, sons or daughters are in danger of death. We are the ones explaining that even without COVID, their dear ones cannot be treated for their heart attacks or other illnesses because there are no beds in the teaching center where they could receive the necessary care. Just recently a co-worker and I faced the hard reality that an ambulance or helicopter simply couldn’t carry enough oxygen for the management of a critically ill patient to be transferred. A patient who subsequently died.

So here is what I’m asking. Whatever you believe about COVID, just pray for the pandemic to end. Pray for the sick and dying. Whether or not you know them, lives are being lost as their bodies are ravaged by a thing we barely understand.

And pray — desperately, corporately — for those whose calling is the treatment of the victims of this wretched virus. Pray for insight, compassion, strength and hope. Furthermore, offer words of comfort. They are quiet, and often have learned to carry their pain in silence. Send them kind words. Give them counseling. Take food to the ERs and ICUs. Whatever kindness you can offer, please do it.

These are terrible times. But God is greater than all we face.