BBC Radio Leicester Thought for the Day

©John Denney 17 September 2003

I’ve been feeling a bit under the weather. As you might be able to tell, I’ve got one of those Summer colds. There’s a lot of it about. And they seem much worse than Winter colds, don’t they? I’ve been ever so achy, and muzzy-headed, and sniffly. And it doesn’t want to go away.

I was feeling quite miserable yesterday, and then I had to go to the doctor to get a test result. And the result was normal. Good news! I felt much better.

When I got home, I heard that Emily Rose Christian had been born, the first child to be born on Pitcairn Island in seventeen years. She’s the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grand-daughter of Fletcher Christian, the leader of the mutineers from HMS Bounty. A new life and an expression of hope!

And then I saw that the world’s oldest woman, Kamato Hongo from Kagoshima in Japan had just celebrated her 116^th birthday with a glass of schochu (a sort of local vodka) and an attempt to take part in the traditional dance of her home village. Another affirmation of life! [See below for a couple of links]

And then a friend phoned me up to ask how my cold was going, and said she’d just been praying for me. All that good news that God had put in front of me, because someone cared enough to pray! No wonder I was starting to feel better!

More and more scientific research seems to show the power of prayer in helping people to get better. Some seriously ill people didn’t even know they were being prayed for, but they still improved more and got better quicker than similar people who weren’t prayed for.

God answers the prayers of his children – that’s you and me – because he loves us. He doesn’t always answer “Yes” to our requests. Sometimes it’s “No” or “Not Yet”. When a little girl asks Daddy for a pony, he might want her to wait until she can look after it. Or maybe he’d say “No” if they lived in a block of flats. In the same way, God has our best interests in mind when He answers our prayers. But he loves us to ask. He loves us to open our hearts to Him, just as any parent loves to have his child cuddle up and talk. And it’s two-way traffic. He loves to talk to you. It’s not to be sneezed at!

Why not give prayer a try?

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