A Review of Rick Hamlin’s “Pray for Me”
Healing Prayers
If you’ve been following me here on Medium, you’ll know that I’m not a big fan of the God-as-Fairy-Godmother approach — that you can pray to God to miraculously cure oneself or someone else. However, my attitude towards this has been changing a bit. I recently read Evan Moffic’s The Happiness Prayer, and came away thinking that prayer might have some kind of healing element to it. Well, here comes another book about the healing power of prayer, but Rick Hamlin’s Pray for Me is remarkably muted in its approach. This means that it can be pretty much read by anyone of any faith tradition, and you will not come away offended by it. The “God talk” is pretty sparse, and whatever talk there is pretty much merits the book being released by a major Christian publisher.
Taking cues from Nora Gallagher’s Moonlight Sonata in the Mayo Clinic, Pray for Me is a health memoir about coming down with an infection that leaves doctors baffled and finding faith through it all, even if it means, through both books, you have the prospect of losing your eyesight (in Gallagher’s case) or facing the fact you might be dying (in Hamlin’s case). Two years ago this month, Hamlin came down with a mystery ailment that had him relegated to the Intensive Care Unit at a New York City hospital. Doctors really had no idea why he had trouble breathing, though they eventually suspected it may have been an allergic reaction to some antibiotics he had started taking to heal a skin lesion.
As Hamlin lay suffering in the ICU, his wife started sending out mass emails to friends and colleagues — Hamlin is the executive editor of Guideposts magazine — hoping that those prayers would help him recover. What this book is not is a book about how prayer heals in the sense that you can ask God for anything miraculous, and He will do it. (Well, there is a slight touch of this in the book, but it isn’t really in-your-face or treated as some kind of supernatural ability to miraculously tap into a healing power given from above.) Instead, as Hamlin lies in his bed, thinking that he’s dying, he uses the time to reflect on his family, notably his two grown sons, and any health tribulations he and his sons had gone through previously. Hamlin also writes of courting his wife, and generally being younger and not facing death squarely in the eye.
Pray for Me is a little hard to review, not just because it’s a personal story, but it is about 200 pages long with generous white space and big text, so it can be consumed quickly. However, Hamlin writes with enough wide-eyed wonder and a sense of gratitude for all he has been given in his life that this memoir of sickness is engrossing. I read it virtually in one sitting, and didn’t feel any sense of fatigue or obligation to get this review squared away. You come to care about Hamlin and his family, and root for him to pull through.
What’s nice about the book is that there really isn’t much vagueness or stuff that’s left to the imagination in the personal story being told, which is both a feature and a failing of many Christian memoirs. Hamlin lays things basically on the line. While there isn’t much to say about his mystery hospital stay — after all, he was in bed for much of the time — what’s surprising and refreshing in a way is the fact that Hamlin doesn’t use the book as a platform to preach or convert people. He also doesn’t have very much to tell about the healing nature of prayer, though he seems grateful for the prayers and that people were thinking of him — some of whom came to visit him in the hospital once his strength gradually began returning.
The book is more about coming down with an illness that puts you flat on your back and the long, arduous road towards recovery. In that sense, this is much more of a personal story than any scientific or religious look at the benefits of prayer on the recovery process. I was hoping for something more like Andrew Schulman’s Waking the Spirit, a title that examines music’s healing effects through more of a scientific lens. Pray for Me might have been bolstered by Hamlin talking to a few religious or science professionals, and talking about the effects prayer might have had on the process of “getting better” from a more academic viewpoint.
Still, Pray for Me is, as they say, a “good read.” It makes one think of the trials and tribulations of getting older — Hamlin got sick in his early 60s — and the book allows the reader to reflect on their own life, and whether or not he or she has any regrets. Time with Pray for Me is ultimately time well spent. Its target audience is probably older Christian readers, but, again, this is a book that is fairly universal and it should appeal to a broad range of people. Simply put, if you’re looking for a reasonably great book to read about a medical crisis and how one person found the strength to bounce back from it, this is a decent place to start. It might serve as a useful springboard to the other books mentioned in this review, too. Pray for Me is easy on the mind and light on the heart, and is a propulsive, fast read that should leave the most cynical readers reasonably pleased.
Rick Hamlin’s Pray for Me: Finding Faith in a Crisis will be published by FaithWords on September 19, 2017.
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