For six years we have been praying for Peter Schreiner in church on Sundays.
Peter is not a member of Christ Church, nor does he have family in Charlotte.* Until recently, I have never known why he needed our prayers. I finally Googled his name and learned that Peter, at 27, was in a car accident in 2017. He fractured his T5 vertebra and had no movement or sensation below his chest. Peter, a former scuba instructor, could not sit up, talk, eat by mouth, or take a drink of water.
I reached out to Peter’s mother recently and asked how Peter is doing. Peter is living independently in California, drives a car, and continues physical therapy and participation in clinical trials with leading spinal injury scientists. He is still challenged by paralysis of 75% of his body but has some live nerve connections through his injury site and is slowly getting some voluntary movement in some leg muscles.
We will continue to pray for Peter weekly, but no longer on Sundays. We will pray for him every Wednesday at our noon Eucharist as we pray for several others each week at that service.** (See below for an explanation of our two prayer lists.)
I don’t know how or why prayer works (I must have missed that class in seminary). Sometimes intercessory prayers in church can feel more like announcements than petitions. If our prayer list is announcing anything, it is announcing the needs we all have and reminding us that we are responsible to help carry one another’s burdens.
Our prayers are not meant to inform God of a matter or to manipulate God to do our bidding. Our prayers are not something we do to God or for God, but they are what God is doing for us, and in us, and through us. We need to say our prayers far more than God needs to hear them.
Prayers are an act of caring for one another, of joining God’s work of healing, reconciliation, protecting, blessing. I believe our prayers for others find their intended receivers and that because of prayer things happen that would not happen without prayer – for both the one who is prayed for and the one who prays. Theologian Karl Barth said “to clasp the hands in prayer is an uprising against the disorder of the world.”
I have never met Peter Schreiner, but because I have prayed for him regularly for six years, I feel a connection to him. And now, knowing some of his story, I am reminded of a word we hear these days only in the Bible, a word exclaimed when God’s genius and great love is revealed: Behold!
– Lisa
* We came to know about Peter through Christ Church parishioner, Martha Alexander. Martha knows Peter’s mother, Mary Kate Wold, CEO of the Church Pension Group or CPG, which is near and dear to my almost 65-year-old self these days. Martha served on the CPG Board of Trustees, and when Martha attended board meetings in New York City, she liked to take a current Christ Church bulletin to show Peter’s mother that we were praying for her son.
** Our Sunday prayer list is the first line of defense for our parish. This is the place for pressing and acute needs of parishioners and those in their immediate circles. This is the list we are all encouraged to use in our daily prayers at home. The Sunday prayer list is generally a temporary home for our prayer requests. The Wednesday noon Eucharist is a place to be intentionally prayed for by the community and a minister with the laying on of hands and anointing with oil (James 5:14–15). The Wednesday prayer list is a place for parishioners with chronic or long-term needs to be held in prayer by the people and clergy of Christ Church. – The Rev. Connor Gwin, Associate Rector for Spiritual Well-being and Care.