Illness and tragedy wounded them. Faith and family healed them.
In 1856, a baby boy named Justin Bouhort was born in France. From the beginning of his life, Justin had been frequently ill. By age two, he had never walked and was dying from tuberculosis—a disease consuming Europe. No cure existed. It seemed Justin was another hopeless case. Desperate to help ease the suffering of her little boy, Justin’s mother took him to the grotto at Lourdes late one afternoon to implore the help of the Blessed Virgin Mary. With little Justin breathing shallowly in her arms, she approached the rock and whispered a prayer.
She bathed Justin’s emaciated body in the water and then returned home. Over the course of a few days, the unthinkable happened—Justin began to walk and eventually made a full recovery. He went on to enjoy a long, healthy life of 79 years. It seems God answered a mother’s prayer for her son.
Such success stories always cause a certain spiritual schizophrenia in me because I can relate to them in two very different ways. I have been the son who was healed from a chronic intestinal disorder through what I believe were my mom’s prayers. But I have also been the desperate, terrified parent who pleaded for God to help my two babies survive, only to have my prayers met with God’s silence when they died.
Why does God say yes to some prayers and not others? I want to believe Jesus’ promise that “whatever you ask in my name, I will do” (John 14:13). But it seems these words are true only some of the time. Will God answer my prayer? I can’t help but wonder.
Let the Pain Begin
Physical pain became a daily part of my life when I was five. It began one night when I was eating dinner with my family at a restaurant. Without warning, a sharp pinch struck my lower abdomen as though a knife were piercing it. The pain wouldn’t go away, so my mom rushed me home where I endured hours of severe abdominal cramps, which finally subsided by morning.
We attributed my symptoms to a bad case of food poisoning. But unfortunately, the pain kept returning and evolved into a chronic intestinal disorder that caused many other long days and nights of anguish.
Digestive problems ran in the family. My dad had suffered with ulcerative colitis—a serious illness of the colon—since he was 16. But after frequent medical examinations, my pediatrician assured us I didn’t share the same condition. I was just a nervous kid. Nevertheless, my pain and unwelcome lavatory emergencies continued and made engaging in the usual childhood activities burdensome and embarrassing.
I was absent from school an average of 30 days a year—something that teachers never fully understood. And when I got sick, I needed to leave places in a hurry—classrooms, playing fields, friends’ houses, movies, restaurants, churches. No place was safe. Moment by moment, my health was always uncertain, which often made me feel weak and insecure.
The Challenge of Coping
When I was seven, my dad contracted colon cancer. Day after day, I witnessed the ultimate fight—a man trying to hold onto his life and his family. It was a battle to the death between my dad and cancer. Just after my ninth birthday, on a rainy July morning, the cancer won. God called my dad home.
During the following years, I finished Catholic primary and high school. Throughout the journey, I did my best to tolerate my illness. I prayed to God for strength to carry that cross, which sometimes felt unbearably heavy.
Over time, I grew accustomed to living with my limitations. But when I registered for college in the summer of 1993, my symptoms intensified. Forced to quit my afterschool job at a grocery store, I was also considering dropping my first-semester classes because I couldn’t keep a regular schedule. I wondered how I could pursue my educational and career goals when I was sick all the time. My life was a giant question mark.
No longer content with diagnoses from doctors who assured me I had “nothing to worry about,” I sought another opinion from a specialist. After extensive testing, the doctor found no major problems with me but prescribed some dietary supplements, which didn’t work. So my pain continued.
At this point I was out of options. Modern medicine couldn’t help me. And I feared that someday I would die an early death as my dad did. After all, my symptoms were almost identical to his and they weren’t getting any better.
For the first time in my life, I found myself walking in the darkness of despair.
Experiencing God’s Healing
Witnessing my frustration with a phantom illness that couldn’t be identified or treated, my mom encouraged me to persevere. But I could see her disappointment and uncertainty about what to do next. My symptoms didn’t show any signs of getting better.
My mom assured me she would begin saying a daily Rosary with the explicit intention that I would be healed. Ten years later, she remembers her feelings: “Watching you suffer and not being able to help you, I knew the utter desperation Mary must have felt when she looked up at Jesus on the cross, so I knew that placing you in her hands was my only hope.
“Not knowing what else to do, I poured myself out like liquid from the depths of my soul and prayed for your healing through our Blessed Mother’s intercession.” Weeks passed and nothing changed.
Then, one fall morning, I rolled out of bed and stumbled still half-asleep to the bathroom. But something was different. My abdominal pain wasn’t there. I tried not to think about it; I was sure my usual symptoms would resurface from wherever they were hiding.
But they didn’t return that day or come back the next. The chronic pain—that old foe that had haunted me for 15 years—left and has never returned. There are no medical explanations. It seems God answered another mother’s prayer for her son.
A Bolstered Faith
Free from the shackles of illness, I felt incredible joy being able to re-engage in my life as a healthy young man. I was so thankful to God for the gift of his mercy. Like the Psalmist, my heart sang with thanksgiving: “You changed my mourning into dancing; you took off my sackcloth and clothed me with gladness. With my whole being I sing endless praise to you. O Lord, my God, forever will I give you thanks” (Psalm 30:12-13).
The life I had always dreamed of was mine for the taking because pain was no longer weighing me down. So I immersed myself in my college coursework, became involved in the extracurricular activities I had always wanted to join and began to cultivate friendships that I still treasure today. In God’s “yes” to my mom’s prayer, I felt as though he was looking out for me.
Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash
And I began to deeply trust in God’s loving providence and protection.
Several years after graduating from college, I discerned that God was calling me to serve his purposes as a theologian and Christian writer. So I enrolled in a master’s degree program in theology. Shortly thereafter, I married Sarah, the woman of beauty and holiness for whom I had been praying. Life was good. God was on my side. My faith was huge and unshakable.
Tragedy Strikes
Sarah and I were looking forward to starting our family early in our marriage. We often joked about how our lives would change once we had some “little curly-headed monsters” running around the house. We hoped and prayed that God would cooperate with us in creating life. And God did.
Eight months after our wedding, we learned that Sarah was expecting. Any parent can relate to the exhilaration we felt when we heard the news. But early in the pregnancy, Sarah started bleeding. After consulting with our doctor, we learned we might lose the baby. We pleaded with God to let our baby live. And our loved ones assured us that they too were lifting up our baby in their prayers.
But on a February morning, prayers were not enough. We lost our little one to a miscarriage. Many tears later, we decided to pick up the pieces of our hearts and try to have another child. Eight months passed, and we became parents again.
This time, the pregnancy looked perfect. There was no bleeding, the baby’s heart was beating at 12 weeks and by the end of the first trimester, Sarah was touting a little round belly. After losing our first child, we had recruited all of the prayer warriors we knew to ask God to protect our beloved baby. So our friends and family prayed and commissioned their friends and family to pray. All of the spiritual support we received was comforting. And knowing that the baby had developed normally through the first trimester, we developed a reserved confidence that all would go well.
When Sarah was five months pregnant, we went to the doctor for a routine checkup. While the nurse jellied up Sarah’s belly to monitor the baby’s heartbeat, we joked about past visits when it sounded like the drums of a marching band over the speaker. The nurse moved the instrument around, but we didn’t hear anything.
After a minute of silence, a tear ran down Sarah’s cheek. The nurse called the doctor, who used a different device. The heartbeat still wasn’t there. As Sarah began to weep, I’ll never forget the doctor’s words: “I’m concerned. It doesn’t look good.”
A sonogram confirmed our worst nightmare—our second child, a baby boy, was dead.
Deafening Silence
Sarah, trembling, fell into my arms and sobbed. As I held her, I entered a dark fog, completely speechless. I felt a pain so deep it was as though the breath of life had been sucked out of me. We had been praying that God would protect our son. But now, after we had lost two babies, God’s silence to those prayers was deafening.
Because Sarah was well into her second trimester, delivery had to be induced at the hospital birthing center—the same place we had planned to deliver our baby four months later.
As we walked to our room, the walls displayed pictures of newborns and other sentimental scenes depicting the beauty of new life and parenthood. I distinctly remember one that showed a father walking hand-in-hand with his little boy on the beach. I held back tears thinking about the special times I might have shared with my son—dreams that were so alive and vivid just a few hours earlier that day.
But the worst was yet to come. Our doctor predicted that Sarah’s labor could last up to three days. I couldn’t imagine her suffering with the emotional and physical pain of this trauma for that long. I wanted to pray for her, but how could I? I felt that God had abandoned us. But I managed to pull together some scraps of faith and asked God to hold her in his hands.
Twelve hours later, at 8:15 a.m. on January 22, our son, Robert George Schroeder IV, was born. The nurse gave his tiny lifeless body to me, and I held Bobby for the first time. He was our beautiful boy. His umbilical cord, strung tightly around his neck, was the alleged cause of his premature death.
As I cradled him in my arms, a thousand different emotions swept through my heart at once. I couldn’t understand why this was happening to us. We were faithful Catholics who sought to do God’s will. Everyone had been praying for our baby. Why didn’t God answer our prayers? How could I ever confidently ask God for anything again?
Never an Easy Journey
God’s mysterious and unpredictable responses to prayer continue to create a bumpy, uncomfortable ride on my spiritual path. I’m puzzled about why God answered prayers my mom offered for me 10 years ago, but he didn’t grant many good intentions for our two precious babies.
God’s benevolent response to prayers of petition is foundational to Christianity. In the Gospels, Jesus frequently grants the requests of those in genuine need during his public ministry. He opens blind eyes, restores paralyzed limbs, drives out demons and even raises lifeless bodies from the dead. Likening prayer to that of a child asking his or her parent for help, Jesus teaches his disciples to ask confidently for the good things they need with the assurance that “whatever you ask for in prayer with faith, you will receive” (Matthew 21:22).
As the pain, frustrations and trials of the human condition reach their tendrils into our lives, we too offer our petitions to God in faith. Joy and thankfulness fill our hearts when God grants our prayer requests, while desolation and sadness haunt us when our prayers evoke only God’s silence. Either way, we live in uncertainty about what God will do with our prayers. But we have high expectations.
Maybe the reason is our past experience of having our prayers answered or the Gospels’ assurance that we will receive what we ask for or the many miraculous accounts embedded in the Catholic tradition. When our prayers go unanswered, we often ask, “Why didn’t God grant our petitions as Jesus promised? Is our faith not great enough? Would a different type of prayer have been more effective? Did God say no because we have offended?”
Though my soul fills with thanksgiving for the many blessings God has given me, such questions still jab at my faith as I try to reconcile my recovery through prayer and the death of my two children for whom prayer seemed ineffective. And as Christians, we all struggle with this mystery of prayer bound up in our experience of God who both answers us and remains silent.
But we must remember that God is involved in the world in ways we often don’t understand. There is no better evidence of this than the cross. How unreasonable it is that our redemption—God’s ultimate gift of love to us—could flow out of such a grave act of injustice as Jesus’ death. It just goes to prove we can’t elevate our own limited perspective above God’s.
I have found some peace in accepting that I won’t ever fully understand all there is to know about God and his providence. Some things are beyond reason’s grasp. As St. Paul says, our earthly life only allows for a dim, partial vision of things (see 1 Corinthians 13:12). We are given no simple answers about why some prayers are granted and others are not. God has not revealed this to us.
But God has made known that he loves us as his own children. And God desires that we live as members of his family and come to him with our needs. Just as children don’t understand all of the reasons for their parents’ decisions, it’s equally difficult for us not knowing why God does what he does with our prayers.
“How inscrutable are his judgments and how unsearchable his ways!” (Romans 11:33). Yet, being the curious children of God that we are, we naturally ask, “Why?”
Will God answer my prayer? I’m still not sure. But I trust that God knows better than I do and will respond accordingly. The challenge is to accept the great mystery that will inevitably be wrapped up in his answer.
