Don't worry about anything, but pray about everything. With thankful hearts offer up your prayers and requests to God. Then, because you belong to Christ Jesus, God will bless you with peace that no one can completely understand. And this peace will control the way you think and feel.
—Phil. 4.6,7 CEV

Ann Floyd is from a praying family who believes in the power of divine healing. But in 1992, she sat in a doctor's office listening to his chilling diagnosis of a brain tumor. Her first thought was panic, not prayer.

"As a child of God, I was ashamed of the way I handled it," says Floyd, a technical and research editor in Springfield, Mo.. "I experienced anxiety attacks and depression." Feeling unable to pray herself, Floyd relied on others. "I was not shy about asking," she confesses.

During prayer at church one evening, Floyd had a sense of being lifted above her illness. "It was as if people were saying, 'Ann, we are not going to let you go.'"

Back at the hospital her doctor prepared her for surgery. He explained how he would cut and peel back her scalp. After a CAT scan, the surgeon came in, glanced at her, then back at the films. Floyd says, "He was not a Christian. He was scientifically oriented, professional, and learned. I wouldn't want to match wits with him. But he turned and wiped tears from his eyes. 'It's gone!' he said."

"Have you ever seen this happen?" Floyd asked.

"Never!" the doctor answered.

Treatment Via Prayer

Disciples of Jesus Christ have been proving prayer facilitates healing since the first century. They never needed science to affirm their experience or prove the power of God. But new research confirms for skeptics what scientists call "nonlocal" effects of intercessory prayer.

Treatment via prayer is unlike any pill, potion or surgical procedure, explains Jeanne Achterberg, a doctor of psychology at the Saybrook Institute in San Francisco. "Prayer transcends the technical and involves the less visible aspects of healing—intention, motivation, trust, and something as ineffable as passion for living."

Unlike the technical treatments, it doesn't seem to matter how far apart the one praying is from the one being prayed for. And there's apparently no travel time for the effect. In one study at the university of Vermont, when intercessors prayed for seriously ill individuals, fewer deaths resulted. In recovery, those prayed over required less potent medication.

"Experience suggests we should try to maximize the … plain fact that it is powerful," writes Dr. Larry Dossey, author of Prayer is Good Medicine (HarperSanFrancisco) about the effects of prayer on his patient's health. "Through compassionate prayer I can influence your reality, even when you're unaware I'm doing so," he says.

In his studies of those who pray for themselves, Dossey makes distinctions between the prayers of those who merely "go to church" and those who "go to God." He also makes distinctions between "petitionary, please do this, God" prayers, and "They will be done" prayers.

Herbert Benson, a Harvard professor who wrote Timeless Healing: The Power and Biology of Belief (Scribner) found those who go to God and put matters in his hands are more conducive to healing. "Faith in an invincible and infallible force," he writes, "is a supremely potent belief."

Still, if science concludes that prayer is not so much miracle as part of the natural law of quantum physics, why do believers still suffer illness and untimely death? What are we supposed to think when prayer does not bring personally desired results?

That was a question Ann Floyd wrestled with six years before her own illness when her 21-year-old son, Steve, died from a brain tumor. "We came up to that thing frantic," she says. "This was a boy who always loved God. He spent a year at Bible college and traveled overseas on a missions assignment.'

Steve knew his family, church nationwide, and friends were praying for his healing. But he told his parents, "I want what God wants."

"Who were we to argue with that?" Floyd asks now. "There came a point as Steve grew weaker when, although I knew God could heal him, I accepted the fact that healing is not what counts."

What does count is how God can redeem even the worst-case scenario.

"I saw it with my own eyes," Floyd says. "Steve's death was beautiful." The beauty was in his faithfulness through the pain, his acceptance of it, and his readiness for heaven.

The Floyds saw a spiritually vibrant young man who was merely fading physically, so they made a decision to accept that as God's gift to Steve. They knew death would move him ahead, not backwards. "I don't think it's morbid to sit at the bedside of a child of God who is ready to go home," Floyd says. "His father and I didn't want to stay stuck, asking 'Why, God?' for the rest of our lives."

But why did the Floyds' son die, though many were praying, while Ann was later miraculously healed?

The Effect is Cyclical

What prayer can't do for the body, it does for the soul. Ann Floyd discovered this as she worked through the disillusioning reality of her son's death. "I've never had fewer answers," she says. "And I've never been more in love with Jesus than I am today." The very act of talking with him daily deepened their relationship, she says. It deepened her connection with God and others.

This is God's ultimate and higher purpose. The effect is cyclical. The very act of praying is inherently faith-building because whatever brings us to our knees—suffering, and often sickness—brings us closer to God and each other.

Whatever brings us closer to God and to each other brings us joy and peace. Joy and peace replenish the soul just as the ocean is replenished by rivers fed by melting snow. In that environment, healing is most likely to happen.

"My surgeon told me attitude is 98 percent of whipping this disease," says Gwen Ellis of Grand Rapids, Mich., who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Warned it had spread everywhere, she was scheduled for immediate surgery followed by 24 chemotherapy treatments over the next six months.

"I decided why whine?" Ellis says about her darkest days. "I decided to laugh as much as I could!"

A single woman with no one to help her at home, Ellis was dependent on her income as a book editor. She determined, "I was going to tell everybody, and if I needed help, to ask for it. I started with my boss. An author was there at the time and he told me, 'I'm going to pray for you every day until you lick this thing.' He did, too!"

Little by little her prayer circle grew by word of mouth. In the hospital Ellis received 35 bouquets and more than 200 cards from people who promised to pray. Throughout treatment, she continued to work, rubbing shoulders with people who cared about her, missing only one day. How did she do it?

"I never went to a cancer group because they talk about dying," Ellis says. "I wanted friends who were thoroughly into living." Still she wasn't without support: "Weekends, I had to stay in bed so my daughter bought me a black and white cat to snuggle."

Healing Happens

Healing happens, and it's intimacy that does the trick. Your support may come from a cuddly cat, a circle of friends and family, or all three. It's "love and intimacy at the root of what makes us sick and what makes us well," says Dr. Dean Ornish, an internist from Sausalito, California.

As the author of Love & Survival: The Scientific Basis for the Healing Power of Intimacy (HarperCollins), Ornish argues for the healing power of companionship and connectedness. In ongoing studies, his research confirms that loneliness and isolation are the major health-risk factor all over the world.

"People who lack social support tend to stew in stress hormones all the time," agrees Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky.

Helping people express feelings and nurture relationships can change the chemistry that feeds illness, Ornish explains. He quotes studies that show how emotional intimacy helps keep people alive:

• When women answered the question, "Do you feel isolated?" those who said yes were three-and-a-half times as likely to die of breast, ovarian, or uterine cancer over a 17-year-period.  
• Heart patients who did not "feel loved" had 50 percent more arterial damage than those who did.  
• Unmarried heart patients who answered "no" to the question "Do you have a confidant?" were three times as likely to die within five years.  
• Heart-attack survivors who lived alone were more than twice as likely to die within a year.

When we are ill we see more clearly that life is dependent on more than visible resources. As Ornish puts it: "Reaching out to others can help our bodies thrive." Or, as patients like Ann Floyd and medical doctors like Dale Matthews, agree: God works miracles through our faith in him and prayer. If not a miracle in the body, than in our minds to accept what happens to the body. The miracle may happen in our souls to allow him to use us in all circumstances.

"We're wired for God," Herbert Benson adds simply.

Ellis is quick to say "Amen." Today she's been given a clean bill of health. On one particular test, when the signs of cancer diminished remarkably over a two-month period, she asked the doctor, "Do we have a miracle going on here?"

The doctor raised his eyebrows and didn't say a thing. Her health never re-entered the danger zone.

So be it, Ellis decided. Her doctor may be skeptical. He may continue to question whether the combination of prayer, togetherness, and an environment of joy do indeed facilitate healing. Meanwhile, Ellis is living with laughter. In sickness, she concludes, she learned that life does not require the absence of suffering to be meaningful.

Even death, Ann Floyd adds, can be redemptive. In either case, prayer brings us healing. Sometimes it's physical, but always it's of the soul.

Marlee Alex is a writer and editor in Sisters, Ore. From her serene cubbyhole between the mountains and the desert, she enjoys research on postmodern thought and the church (well, whenever she isn't fishing, hiking, snowboarding—you get the picture). She can be contacted at marleebooks@aol.com.