Prayer When Life’s in the Balance: One Pentecostal’s Perspectives on Luther’s Theology of the Cross

Abstract

Hearing the word ‘death’ applied to oneself is a remarkably sobering experience. This is particularly true when the ‘one’ being referred to is a Pentecostal, a theologian, and a friend of Martin Luther. Reading Luther with Pentecostal ears is always a deconstructive process against the accumulated Luther scholarship that champions his view of the objective nature of Word and Sacrament over against the vicissitude of spiritual experience. Nevertheless, two moments in Luther’s life (the recovery of Philip Melanchthon and the death of his daughter Magdalena) open perspectives on the personal appropriation of the theologia crucis in the later Luther. In the process they illuminate the Pentecostal longing for healing, while critiquing some of its popular paradigms. Together they voice this particular ‘one’s’ journey through a bout of cancer.

1. Introduction: The Day the Word ‘Death’ Was Applied to Me

It was one of those perfect summer days. The sun was bright, the sky cloudless, yet the humidity was at bay, and the July heat was moderated by a gentle breeze. I sat in the shade of the porch with a great biography in hand. The phone rang, and I gazed for what seemed an eternity at the clinic’s name on the screen. I knew it could not be good news. Why else would they be calling the day after I had been in for tests?

I mustered all my courage and answered. The doctor announced that my numbers were not good. In fact, they were threatening. And so began a year’s journey with prostate cancer. As a few pointed out to me, at least it was “the good kind of cancer”. I was left to wonder what good, but then, numbers like mine opened doors rapidly in Canada’s health system, where long waits are the order of the day (see, that was good, wasn’t it?). The next thing I knew I was facing a battery of tests. It wasn’t clear yet whether the cancer had metastasized, but it didn’t appear to be in my bones.

A few days later I talked to my oncologist on the phone again, due to COVID-19. I ‘manned up’ in one of those ‘give-it-to-me straight-doc’ moments. “Well, in the best case we take it out and it’s all good”. (I liked this guy but was bracing myself for the opposite eventuality.) “Worst case you could be gone by Christmas”. I was rather hoping to enjoy the new year… and a few more after that.

Those were the most sobering words I had ever heard. There I was on that same porch, alone, as the message sank in. I wept. Later, I told my wife. She wept. And that night as we lay in bed, contemplating the alternatives, the stakes, the blunt possibility, we wept. And we prayed1.

Cancer. It redefines everything. And once that word is spoken over a life, everything else becomes provisional, contingent… unsure. Of course, things were always that way, weren’t they?

Prayer in the face of life-threatening disease is a complex issue, especially when it forces one to face one’s theological presuppositions concerning health, healing, and faith. This is not a research paper, but one Pentecostal’s existential meditation surrounding his circumstance, his spirituality, and his theology.

2. The Pentecostal, the Prostate, and Prayer

I am a Christian, one of the ‘Jesus People’, a Pentecostal. I was dramatically ‘saved’ in 1975 in a Damascus Road conversion, and despite warnings about them, soon fell in with charismatics at Bishop’s University in Sherbrooke, Québec, and eventually found my spiritual home in a Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada church. That guy is still alive and well in here—a tongue-talking, hand-waving, as well as hand-laying ‘pray for the sick and they shall recover’ kind of Christ-follower.

I was also a pastor for thirty years in two growing, contemporary, Willow Creek–Saddleback-aspiring churches. I drank the church growth Kool-Aid in the ‘80s and saw modest results, always wanting more, but trying to stay positive and rejoice in what we did achieve. I suppose that last phrase describes my entire Christian experience until I sat on that porch that July morning: pressing in for more, settling for less. I had seen miracles… well, just a few hard-core ones. I had experienced the prophetic, encountered the supernatural, and enjoyed “the anointing” in my preaching—enough to be grateful, but not enough to be satisfied. And while I had my share of pastoral victories, I had been through enough pastoral crises to still bear the scars.

During the process of pastoring, I continually felt the need for ongoing studies—perhaps to maintain my sanity. Ultimately, this meant completing a Ph.D. in theology. My dissertation examined Pentecostal triumphalism through the lens of Luther’s theology of the cross. While reading Douglas John Hall’s classic Lighten Our Darkness, I found language that captured my struggle as a pastor, a Pentecostal, and a Christian.

“Human life”, Hall claims (Hall 1976, p. 19), “is a dialogue between expectation and experience”. The epithet Hall presciently gave to the Amazon-driven celebrity-of-the-moment consumer pop culture we call home, and the one in which he lived in the ‘60s and ‘70s, is the “officially optimistic society”. He proposes that this culture is defined by the offer of a series of expectations that cannot be sustained and are constantly being called into question by the harsh reality of disappointed experience. During the conflict between expectation and experience, Hall claims that religion should offer experience a hope that transcends the here and now. But it must also remind expectancy of the limits of existence on this side of the consummation. Ideally, religion should maintain an equidistant critique of both unbridled expectation and unrelenting experience. Hall’s contention is that post-Constantinian Christianity has failed in this purpose. He finds in Luther’s theologia crucis a way out of this impasse (Hall 1976, pp. 21, 34).

Pentecostals tend to highlight expectation, and all too often minimize, redefine, and sometimes even outright deny disappointed experience. Theology has tempered my Pentecostal brashness, but Pentecostalism has quickened my theology into a spiritual encounter. And as I sat there, in that early July during the pandemic with a potentially terminal diagnosis, I needed both to guide me. While Hall’s insight provided a fresh perspective for pondering the theological dilemma of Pentecostalism, it also registered on an existential level. Hall’s invitation to take up Luther as a probe for the problem of Pentecostalism became a challenge to my personal issues, both with it and with my own internal demons of perfectionism and performance.

Pentecostals take prayer seriously. They actually believe that situations and circumstances, that the animate and the inanimate—that cancer—can be changed through prayer.

“That’s been in there for a long time”, a second oncologist commented grimly. “It’s quite enlarged”. And then the discussion started about possible approaches. Along the way, I accidentally stumbled upon just the right specialist. He was world-renowned and leading a clinical study on a drug that might reduce the tumor. It became apparent that he was looking for people with aggressive cancers and ugly scores. I fit the bill. The study involved 80 subjects and randomized them between control and test samples. I was number 80… and scheduled to take the drug in question.

It was the classic good news/bad news story. The bad news is that you have a life-threatening sickness. The good news is that we have a treatment that may help. The bad news is that it will probably make you even sicker. The good news: it is only administered once every three weeks. The daunting array of possibilities, uncertainties, and likelihoods under the general heading “cancer” was increasing.

And here’s the real good news! I am a Christian and I serve a God who took frail flesh and conquered death! Here’s the even better news: I believe that this God–man healed the sick on earth and now lives forever to heal all those who come to him today through prayer. Is that not the beauty of Luther’s marvelous exchange? My sin for his righteousness, and the Pentecostal version, my sickness for his wholeness (Matt. 8:17). But I’ve lived this Pentecostal life long enough to know that we often put on this charismatic bravado, knowing full well that rhetoric is cheap, and the answers are seldom so simple.

We called our entire network of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. We asked for that mystical catalyst: prayer. I had been a pastor for thirty years, a missionary, teaching seminary in Belgium for another seven, and I have always had an uncomfortable relationship with prayer. Do we ever pray enough? And what is enough? We say “I’ll be praying for you”, but do we really? Prayer, it seems, is fraught with problems for the undisciplined Pentecostal.

The overwhelming challenges of pastoring that aspiring megachurch (and never quite getting there) and the hurdles of raising five teenagers (and the self-recriminations of toppled hurdles along the way) had pushed me to several intense seasons of fasting and prayer over the years. But how does fasting work? What happens if you don’t pray while you fast? How do you measure the quality of your praying? Does falling asleep count? And what about daydreaming? What is the role of faith and is there really anything like “faith nothing doubting”?

Pentecostals, of course, never teach anything so crass today, but such questions arise from the primordial layers of early Pentecostalism. In the June 1923 Pentecostal Testimony, S. A. Jamieson complained, “Many sick ones are not healed because they fail God in not complying with the conditions as laid down in God’s word”. He then listed the standard litany of texts and imperatives: believing prayer, the confession of sin, bold resistance of the devil, and more. “If the above directions are followed Jesus will make himself manifest by healing them”, Jamieson concluded bluntly (Jamieson 1923, p. 6). The failure of healing could mean only one thing... human failure. It’s hard work to get healed!

Today, popular Pentecostalism loves stories of healing but says little about the methodology or failure of healing, it just celebrates the miraculous2. Contemporary charismatic accounts, however, are often in closer proximity to early Pentecostalism than the current denominational variety3. Charismatics simply assume that such overcoming faith is within easy reach of the believer. As one current and representative handbook for healing puts it:

Death through sickness is always a premature death. Death does not require sickness. We are mortal and our bodies will wear out, but sicknesses only speed up death… Many precious men and women of God have crossed over into life after death without being sick. This should be our expectation…

The prayer of faith can only be prayed if there is no doubt about God’s will and His provision.

(Bennett 2020, pp. 177–78, 189)

Allan Anderson points out the danger here. “Human faith is placed above the sovereignty and grace of God. Faith becomes a condition for God’s action and the strength of faith is measured by results” (Anderson 2013, p. 221).

But there’s the rub. Where can I obtain that kind of faith? While my mind, my body, and my spirit are wracked with this menacing reality, how do I muster this confidence? And then there is that interminable struggle with Anfechtungen, those faith-depleting, hope-diminishing bouts of internal doubts and external accusations that Luther catalogues so well. Douglas John Hall sharpens the question: “How can one at the same time acquire sufficient honesty about what needs to be faced, and sufficient hope that facing it would make a difference, to engage in altering the course of our present world towards life and not death” (Hall 1987, p. 47, italics in the original).

Hall has revitalized what he calls “the thin tradition” of theologia crucis for many4. By the time I engaged cancer in my ‘60s, by Hall’s good graces, I had already made the acquaintance of Martin Luther in my ‘50s. And now, I had the opportunity to put him to the ultimate test.

3. Luther, Pentecost, and Prayer

For me, Luther appears as something of a proto-Pentecostal. I know this seems counterfactual to most Luther scholars, who define him, in part, by his reaction to the Enthusiasts (Luther’s term for his Protestant opponents, some of whom were given to mystical excesses). Luther found himself in a war of two fronts—first, of course, with Rome, then with a variegated group of pneumatics who, for multiple reasons, found that his Reformation had not gone far enough5. Twentieth-century Lutheran scholarship saw Pentecostals as present-day heirs of the Enthusiasts. Even as perspicacious a scholar as Carter Lindberg (1983, p. 187) read it that way: “Our thesis is that contemporary neo-Pentecostal and charismatic renewal movements have lines of continuity in the sense of leitmotivs reaching back to the Reformation and Pietism”6.

I, however, find Luther to be a fascinating conversation partner for Pentecostals. First, one must account for his interest and involvement in the supernatural realm of angels, demons, miracles, and healings. Secondly, Luther is the source of the radical notion of the priesthood of all believers. Third, Luther has a sense of the apocalyptic and a ready expectation of the Lord’s return. Finally, a more complex factor is Luther’s treatment of spiritual experience (a lengthy defense of this contention is found in Courey 2015, pp. 113–50). However, I find Luther’s interest in using prayer for healing most interesting7.

For some, these may seem to be the artifacts of Luther’s medieval world view and not essential to his thought. Heiko Oberman cautions against such a casual dismissal.

Luther’s world of thought is wholly distorted and apologetically misconstrued if his conception of the Devil is dismissed as a medieval phenomenon and only his faith in Christ retained as relevant or as the only decisive factor. Christ and the Devil were equally real to him... There is no way to grasp Luther’s milieu of experience and faith unless one has an acute sense of his view of Christian existence between God and the Devil.

(Oberman 1987, p. 104)

Luther found himself in a life-or-death struggle with his conscience, with human and supernatural powers on the one hand, and a revelation that he found liberating and life-giving on the other. I wonder if this dialectic, culminating ultimately in Luther’s theologia crucis, is key for deconstructing the Pentecostal impasse with prayer, particularly in the face of the destabilizing catastrophe of unexplainable illness (Thompson 2018)8.

Luther developed the theology of the cross as a hermeneutical and epistemic tool in his battle with the speculative theology of scholasticism. It is a term he uses early in his development, and dispenses with, but a methodology that many scholars believe marks all his work, and applies far beyond strictly soteriological categories. Its essence is found in dismantling all human achievement in grasping the knowledge of God (the so-called theology of glory), but acknowledging that God is hidden and may only be discovered by faith, where he is completely unexpected. “God can only be found in suffering and the cross”, Luther says in the Heidelberg Disputation (Proof of Thesis 21), where he largely formulated the principles of the theologia crucis. Vitor Westhelle claims that “[t]he theology of the cross is a habitus, a way of accepting contradictions” (Westhelle 2016, p. 113). This is where we apprehend it for the purposes of this paper.

Mary Solberg (1997, p. 130) offers an insightful comment about the role of the cross in the stark realities that can pummel our lives. An epistemology of the cross, she says,

describes what happens when the “will to believe this triumph” fails, and whatever “faith” was thought to be, it becomes uncoupled from the bullet train to better days. A death not anticipated, fought against; an encounter with traumatic violence; a last, lost job; a prayer for another’s deliverance, not answered; a human face—perhaps a friend’s—unexpectedly attached to the “threat” of AIDS; a sojourn to a place or among a people where neither heart nor mind can make sense of the suffering one sees: Any of these can be the occasion on which the lights fail, and—for the longest moment—neither success nor denial can restore them.

(Solberg 1997, p. 130)

What, then, of the Pentecostal notion of “prevailing prayer”—prayer that is so persuasive it accomplishes its goal of moving the hand of God?9

Before dispensing with prayer and any Pentecostal concept of divine power in healing, I want to consider two stories from Luther’s biography. Both involve life-threatening disease and prayer. One concerns the miracle of Philip Melanchthon’s healing at a critical juncture of the unfolding of the Reformation, the other the tragedy of Luther’s daughter, Magdalena.

In June 1540, on his way to a colloquy at Hagenau, Melanchthon fell desperately ill near Weimar. He could go no further, nor could he return to Wittenberg. By the time word got back to Luther, intercession for Philip had begun in the church and the academy. Luther made his way to Melanchthon’s side, and by common agreement, Melanchthon was at death’s doorstep. Now, seeing him feeble and sickly, he set himself in earnest to intercession for healing. There is debate as to the historicity of the accounts of Luther’s prayer that have come to us10. What is beyond question is that Melanchthon began to improve, and as Luther wrote to his wife Katie, “I am doing well here. I eat like a Bohemian and drink like a German. Thanks be to God! Amen! This is because Master Philip was truly dead and has arisen from the dead just like Lazarus! God, the dear Father, hears our prayer—that we see and experience—even though we still do not believe it. Let no one say “Amen” to our terrible unbelief!”11

On the cross side of the theologia crucis it is easy to forget that there is a resurrection side too. The problem is that we are so aware of the disruptive side of the dialectic that we forget the celebrative dimension. Jürgen Moltmann seizes this dimension of the cross theology through its dialectic between Easter and Good Friday. “The cross and the resurrection are mutually related and they have to be interpreted in such a way that the one event appears in the light of the other (Moltmann 1990, p. 213)”12. For Moltmann, the resurrection is a proleptic event. As the believer enters into it in the here and now, she is no longer a mere subject of the realm of death but already tastes the powers of the coming age (Moltmann 1990, p. 214)13. The believer is a liminal person, caught up in the new creation even as they suffer in the old.

This explains both the boldness of Luther’s prayer for Melanchthon (its chutzpah, as Wengert puts it) and his delight, even his incredulity that it was answered. Martin Brecht claims that Luther later reported “Our Lord God had to bear the brunt of this, for I threw my sack before his doors, and wearied (‘rubbed,’ cf. Haile, and Wengert) his ears with all his promises of hearing prayers that I knew from the Holy Scriptures, so that he had to hear me if I were to trust any of his other promises (Brecht 1993, p. 210)”14. This is no surprise, as he is simply following his own teaching from his Large Catechism (1529).

We are in such a situation that no one can keep the Ten Commandments perfectly, even though he or she has begun to believe. Besides, the devil, along with the world and our flesh, resists them with all his power. Consequently, nothing is so necessary as to call upon God incessantly and to drum into his ears our prayer that he may give, preserve, and increase in us faith and the fulfillment of the Ten Commandments and remove all that stands in our way and hinders us in this regard.

(Kolb and Wengert 2000, pp. 440–41)

Here, Luther speaks of daily Christian life, but his advice on healing elsewhere reflects a similar attitude15. In one situation, Luther advised that “prayers be said from the chancel of the church, publicly, until God hears”. He instructed the pastor to pray in this way: “we unworthy sinners, relying on these thy words and commands, pray for thy mercy with such faith as we can muster”. Our prayer is imperfect, tainted with human brokenness, but it remains bold and expectant. Luther’s boldness was based on both command and promise16. The Christian is to “drum into [God’s] ears” his promises and their own petitions. This sounds almost Pentecostal, and annoyingly charismatic!17

But I have rushed too quickly past Good Friday to get to Easter and Pentecost. Luther’s “terrible unbelief” of which he was ashamed reminds us of the liminality of the Christian situation between God and the Devil, time and eternity, the already and the not-yet18. We pray, believing the promises and obeying the command; we ask, seek, and knock19; and we trust God’s good disposition toward the prayers he commanded and promised to answer. It is well and good when prayers are answered, but what if they are not? Or, at least, not in the way we expected?

This brings us to our second tale of Luther’s prayers, concerning his daughter Magdalena, the third child of six20. Luther appears in all his writings as having had a very tender heart toward his children. At 13 years of age, Magdalena fell sick, and Luther fell to prayer once more. The record of Luther’s reaction to Magdalena’s sickness is more muted than that of Melanchthon’s. She seems to have languished for a longer period, and if Luther was consistent with his beliefs and practice, we may surmise that he started praying with boldness. And yet he concedes at his daughter’s interment that there is no healing, but “There is a resurrection of the flesh (Luther 1999b, p. 433)”21. As her condition worsened, his prayers became accepting of her death. “I love her very much. But if it is thy will to take her, dear God, I shall be glad to know that she is with thee (Luther 1999b, 430)”22. Nevertheless, as Magdalena was dying in his arms, still Luther wept and “prayed that God might will to save her (Luther 1999b, p. 431)”23. Both he and Katie were enveloped in sorrow. In a letter to his friend and colleague Justus Jonas, Luther admits the following:

I and my wife should only joyfully give thanks for such a felicitous departure and blessed end by which Magdalen has escaped the power of the flesh, the world, the Turk, and the devil; yet the force of [our] natural love is so great that we are unable to do this without crying and grieving in [our] hearts, or even without experiencing death ourselves… [E]ven the death of Christ… is unable totally to take all this away as it should. You, therefore, please give thanks to God in our stead!

(299, “To Justus Jonas [Wittenberg,] 23 September 1542”, Luther 1999c, p. 238)

The anguish is palpable and authentic. As Luther claimed, “A theologian of the cross calls the thing what it is (“Heidelberg Disputation: Thesis 21”, Luther 1999a, p. 57)”.

I am staggered by Luther’s transparency. For all his boldness in prayer, it seems this kind of loss is also possible for a child of God. Yet Luther perseveres, with sorrow and honesty24. This is the liminality of Christian existence in what Deanna Thompson calls “not-yet-resurrection (Thompson 2018; Thompson 2020)”. Mary Solberg termed it an “occasion on which the lights fail”. Douglas John Hall named it the thing that “needs to be faced”. Resignation. The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. The sum of the theology of the cross is this: holy boldness combined with holy meekness. But the Pentecostal asks, “So when do I cross the line between importunity and impossibility?” Luther does not seem to answer.

In this undefined space, this “Holy Saturday” ambiguity, we wait, unsure, provisional, and contingent. Wengert (2009, p. 82) pushes us to the unknown God here: “Rather than using theology to solve the problem of unanswered prayer, Luther rested his case in the certain promise of God… [T]he problem of unanswered prayer must always remain unanswered in theology, lest one abandon God’s promises and, thus, faith itself for explanation”. This indeterminate situation where we have every reason to expect, to anticipate, and yet remain unchanged, unhealed, and unanswered reminds us that, as much as we have received already, we live in the season of “not-yet-resurrection”. We experience what Thompson (2020, p. 157) called “the gospel of irresolution”25. And so we wait, liminal, for that ultimate resolution when we no longer see “through a glass darkly but then face to face”.

4. Church, Prayer, and Cancer in the Time of COVID-19

Waiting and irresolution is what cancer felt like during the pandemic. Chemotherapy, surgery, and recovery took place during successive waves. Shutdowns made church attendance impossible, and during cautious openings, chemo rendered me very vulnerable. Isolated by disease, I found myself cut off from the community of faith. I pestered my wife until she reluctantly brought me with her a few times, and my good friend Garry Fess invited me to preach (elation!). I tried online expressions, but I felt like a distant observer rather than an engaged participant. I longed for the touch of hands laid on me, oil anointing me, God’s Word spoken over me. But COVID-19 was unyielding.

As a pastor, over the years I found myself living out Luther’s injunctions about healing without knowing it. And now, for the first time, I genuinely needed what I had so matter-of-factly offered to others. While the kind of prayer I sought—corporate and hands-on—was unavailable, with arms raised and the tongues of men and angels, I discovered other means. Of course, I knew I was being prayed for, and those ‘arrow prayers’ people offered, presenting me to God in a moment’s remembrance, came to matter a great deal. There were occasions when a friend came by. And whenever the opportunity for prayer arose online, I extended my hands toward the screen (my own embodied response) to receive the blessing.

But it was a small weekly communion service led on Zoom by my dear friend Peter Cusick that became a lifeline for me. Peter is a Spiritual Director and is open to a variety of faith expressions. He cobbled together a series of prayers and readings, moments of spontaneous prayer and reflection that invited each of us who joined to participate actively. There in my room, alone with my laptop, participating in the physical breaking of the bread and the sipping of the cup, being prayed over by real-time people, present and in the moment, in communion with God and with me at the virtual table—this became my not-yet-resurrection nexus with the Lord, the Healer, the Almighty.

COVID-19 created a wonderful laboratory for ecclesiology. For me, technology was another mark of creaturely weakness. It posed an obstacle, but could not entirely hamper the Spirit in brothers and sisters who, like the elements themselves, share the divine presence “in, with and under” the medium. Deanna Thompson, writing from a place of weakness, extols the benefits of the virtual church for reaching the weakest. Her presentation of the body of Christ as an organic entity that revolutionizes social norms progresses toward the church “as a swarm without a center, for Christ is mediated by a decentered and decentering network of charismata. The network, the body, is the center (Guillermo Hansen, cited in Thompson 2016, p. 51)”. For Thompson, the church has always been and can only be a virtual body.

This last image of the swarm is much like Heidi Campbell’s notion of the church as the people of God, what she calls a “dynamic, interactive malleable idea”. She contrasts this with the body of Christ, which, in her opinion, remains the dominant ecclesiology, one that has become stagnant and institutional. She places ekklesia, the church as a structure, in contrast with koinonia, the church as a network, family, or tribe. The ekklesia she contends does not result in the cohesive, collaborative body that it envisions, but rather leaves people disconnected, offering an ‘event’ rather than a relationship. COVID-19 undermined the ‘body’ metaphor, but has permitted the flourishing of the ‘people of God’ metaphor. Like Thompson’s swarm, Campbell’s tribe, “the idea of community as a network, joined together by commitment, but expressing all the individuality and complexity of humankind as they attempt to walk together”, better the fits the extreme liminality of the brokenness of the sick (Campbell 2022, Ch. 2, e-book).

Prayer in this context becomes a spontaneous, interpersonal act, a situation conducive to charismatic prayer, where we can make up the missing embodiment by laying our hands on the screen. But when pared down by COVID-19, Pentecostal spirituality, like its ecclesiology, was reduced to the essentials. Love bound us in the ether, faith sustained us over Wi-Fi, prayer was the digital breath we inhaled. Worship songs seemed limp, sermons seemed like another YouTube preacher… maybe good, but somehow impersonal, even if we knew the speaker personally. But prayer—personal prayer—seemed even more heartfelt, not in spite of, but maybe because of the artificial medium. It was the organic network of care, love, and faith that nourished me. It was Pentecostal spirituality unplugged… or perhaps better, plugged in.

5. Concluding Thoughts

Imperfect, inadequate—my experience was in-between, in irresolution, in waiting. Cancer. The word has been spoken, and it hangs there. And everything remains provisional, contingent… unsure. Cancer has left me changed, broken, not fully functional. It has also left me, for the time being, alive and grateful for every breath I take. As I receive my Eligard injection every three months and fill my satchel with pads each day, I am reminded, as the doctor says, that my cancer “is not cured”. My Pentecostal spirituality—comprising worship, word, prayer, and faith—has been duly instructed by suffering, but remains unbent, perhaps even more resolute! And as each morning dawns, I am reminded there’s life to embrace and squeeze dry, as well as vision and purpose to pursue and fulfill, and I offer my humble hallelujah to the Lord, sometimes vibrant, always broken. And I wait. This posture too, casts a long shadow over the Pentecostal tradition.