Please pray for my buddy Vincent!

Vincent Alexander was like any other kindergartener at Orange Grove Elementary School a month ago. Then something funny started to happen with his eye so he went to the doctor. They did a CT Scan just to rule out the really rare possibilities like AT/RT ((atypical teratoid rhabdoid tumor), which is what it was.

Vincent had a mass removed from his brain. He is currently in the first of six weeks of intensive chemotherapy, after which they will decide whether or not to continue treatment. If the chemotherapy is doing enough to be worth it, then he will go into an even more intensive radiation and chemotherapy regimen five days a week.

I was a chaplain at the Durham VA hospital in the summer of 2009 on the chemotherapy ward. When I prayed with the patients, I never knew exactly what to say. I always asked for healing, but there was always this sense that I wanted to frame my language in such a way that it wouldn’t cause them a crisis of faith if nothing happened.

Somehow with Vincent, I feel God telling me to pray for what is medically impossible to happen as a witness that God is not just an imaginary conversation partner we have created for the sake of our psychological comfort, but the real living sovereign creator of the universe who made every cell in our body and has the power to violate all the laws of science if He chooses. Vincent faces a tremendously uphill battle. Even if he beats all the odds, the treatments will take a toll on his development. I don’t want him to have to do radiation and chemo after the six weeks are up. I want him to be healed. Period.

That’s why I am unashamed to ask God for a CT Scan after six weeks of chemo that doesn’t make any medical sense which looks as though there were never cancer in Vincent’s central nervous system. Please pray with me and tell me that you’re doing it.