Lot's of Praying Around Here

As I sit in the Women's Center at Northside Hospital in Atlanta, where my wife is recuperating from surgery, I have seen a lot of prayer over the last 48 hours. Prayers of joy, prayers of hope, prayers of sorrow and even prayers of anger. I have watched an unending stream of clergy and religious figures flow into and out of the hospital lobby. I even witnessed an asian family with their clergyman cheerfully walking through the atrium to welcome a new arrival to their family, complete with bags of oranges and rice.

In everyday life, there is almost an unspoken embarrassment about religion. Not here. Here it is strong, embraced, participated in and encouraged. Our surgeon grabbed our hands and said a beautiful prayer before he took another life into his hands on an OR table. One of the best surgeons in Atlanta, wealth to spare and the utmost confidence in his ability asked someone above him for help and guidance.

My pseudo intellectual friends make fun of religion and feel as though they have ascended above it's relevance. When my dad was a kid, everyone went to church. There were no school shootings, bombings or babies abandoned in dumpsters. It strikes me as odd as we watch society and humanity erode around us, that we don't at least acknowledge the similar degradation of faith. As we chase prayer out of our schools, should we be surprised that other more nefarious things fill that void? The drastic violence, with such ambivalence, of crimes committed by kids today is simply...devastating.

Here's the point, we watch the human condition erode on a daily basis. We rip a kid like Tim Tebow for being vocal about his faith and praise people like Mike Vick for getting out of prison and getting a job after slaughtering helpless animals. We explain away God in our everyday lives and wonder why everything around us gets worse. We have told God we don't need him and can't seem to figure out why personal accountability is completely gone. Our leaders lie, cheat and line their pockets right in front of us and we don't bat an eyelash.

Jesse Jackson said something that I have reflected upon for years since; If I was walking through a parking lot and a group of young men were walking behind me, I would not worry if they were on their way home from church.

Spend some time in the Oncology unit at Northside Hospital. Try to explain away what you see there.