ISSUES OF FAITH: Summer lessons in prayer and patience

Published 1:30 am Friday, August 7, 2026

IF THIS COLUMN needed a title, it might be “Summer lessons in prayer and patience.”

Vicki and I accompanied our grandson Jacob and his family through four multi-hour brain surgeries to help tame a rare form of epilepsy he has endured for 16 years.

An expected one-week stay at Children’s Hospital for Jacob turned into 15 days.

Attending physicians’ post-surgery comments were, “Well, let’s wait and see how he is tomorrow.”

If these kinds of comments were meant to offer encouragement, they didn’t work very well.

At least for me.

Prayer circles in multiple congregations prayed for Jacob’s successful procedure and recovery, plus wisdom for the medical caregivers. But I admit, while I took my turn in Jacob’s intensive care room, I didn’t have enough energy or focus to pray.

During those and later days that turned into weeks, Julian of Norwich’s adage came to mind, “All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”

Julian was a Christian mystic living in England in the mid-1300s, and she wrote these words after surviving a lengthy death-defying illness.

But, admittedly, I responded (prayed with a moan) “Really, Lord? All will be made well? Just when is that going to happen?”

Frankly, I was not at all comforted with the verse in 2 Peter 3 that says, “For the Lord, one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years is as a day.”

That’s because I am not a very patient person.

I wanted Jacob’s recovery to be quicker and without the rollercoaster of vital signs on the ICU monitor. But digging deeper, I found over and over that trying to follow God’s leading does require a suspension of our own sense of time.

Throughout the Bible, we hear how long things take for God’s plans to be fulfilled.

The number 40 comes up many times and signifies a “long time.” Noah’s ark took 40 days to come to rest on Mount Ararat. The Israelites’ trek from Egypt to the Promised land took 40 years, and Jesus’ experience in the wilderness was 40 days, remember?

I also found psalms that coached me to wait patiently. Psalm 40 is one of them (there’s that number again!). It begins with “I waited patiently for the Lord; he inclined to me and heard my cry.”

I began to re-read other psalms numbered in the 40s and found both my prayers and my hopes were much the same as the writers thousands of years ago.

In fact, when I got to Psalm 44:4, what did I read? “You are my king and my God. … You command victories for Jacob. In God … we will give thanks to your name forever.”

And so, I do give thanks for our grandson Jacob’s return home. I don’t know if “all will be well” yet, but he is on a 40-day trip on an ark to recovery, and I pray more confidently now that there will be a rainbow for all to see, as a promise that indeed all things shall be made well in God’s timing.

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Issues of Faith is a rotating column by religious leaders on the North Olympic Peninsula. Don Corson is an ordained deacon in the Lutheran Church (ELCA) and the winemaker for a local winery. He also is the minister for Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Forks. His email is ccwinemaker@gmail.com.