A friend was joyously sharing good news: Though her brother’s protracted troubles had seemed hopeless, suddenly there was a profound answer to prayer. She had prayed for him for years, but the problem was so big that she hadn’t really expected anything to change. It was like praying for world peace, she said with a laugh that conveyed her wonder and gratitude.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I knew what she meant. The world has plenty of big needs that beg for prayer. We pray because we should, but sometimes the size of those needs makes prayer perplexing. When we pray, what can we expect?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One person who lived as if prayer and action were inseparable was Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who died just recently. He prayed fervently for an end to apartheid in South Africa, and he also worked every day to make it happen. There was a time when I couldn\u2019t imagine that such a powerful, intractable system could ever be dismantled. Now it is difficult to imagine how that evil was allowed to exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I read today\u2019s newspaper headlines, the solutions seem as elusive as world peace\u2014that perennial prayer list request. But then I remember the example of Archbishop Tutu, who could see beyond the present reality. He never lost heart, so why should I?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For him, liberation was a key theme of both the Old and New Testaments. In the midst of apartheid, he preached, \u201cPeople are set free from<\/em> bondage to the world, the Devil and sin, in order to be free for<\/em> God. . . He has set us free from all that has made us less than God intended us to be, so that we could have a humanity measured by nothing less than the humanity of Christ Himself\u201d (Hope and Suffering<\/em>, p. 58). Tutu\u2019s life showed that he wanted that humanity for all people, including those who despised him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I encountered Desmond Tutu three times\u2014in South Africa, New York, and Elgin, Illinois. What I especially remember was his lively presence and infectious laugh. He embodied joy. Perhaps what kept him tireless for 90 years was his immersion in God’s love, which fueled both his private prayers and his public actions. As he wrote in the first line of the first story of his Children of God Storybook Bible, \u201cIn the very beginning, God\u2019s love bubbled over when there was nothing else. . . .\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sometimes the size of the world’s needs makes prayer perplexing. What is the answer? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":3102,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[401,402,38],"class_list":["post-3105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-from-the-publisher","tag-archbishop-desmond-tutu","tag-gods-love","tag-wendy-mcfadden"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3105"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3111,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3105\/revisions\/3111"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}