There was some good discussion at last Friday's Young Adult's group. Can't recall all the questions, but some of it included, "What if no healing occurs? Then what?", "Must there be some divine purpose behind every healing?", "Does the faith of the sick person matter very much for his healing?" and so on.

I recall my uncle who was struck with bacteria meningitis about 3 years ago. We called in a friend who was gifted with healing powers. This friend went into the quarantine room and basically told the disease to leave. Now, one could say that my uncle was going to wake up anyway, whether or not the prayer was made. My take is that the sum of all the prayers made for him plus the medicines plus the faith of the community plus God's healing work working against the skepticism, against the lack of faith and against the disease, eventually produced a positive result.

I know this could sounds overly "accounting-ish" for some, but I think it's the best way of taking into account all the factors involved in a situation and avoiding pat answers whilst still being able to give a reasonable account of "what happened". Of course we could always label everything a mystery, which is perfectly fine in many cases. (I've also attemped to answer similar questions many years back, check it out if you're keen - and see how cocksure I sounded back then, *grin*, like I met God for lunch every now and then, eh?).

Bottom line : Pray pray pray.