Your Prayer Life Does Make a Difference.

Tammy was a physician with latent-stage melanoma (skin cancer). She was receiving chemotherapy. She was hoping that surgery would soon follow her chemotherapy program.

In addition to her chemotherapy program, Tammy considered her prayer life to be an integral part of her treatment plan. Not only did Tammy pray about her medical condition, but so did her parents and many of her friends. Tammy knew through her recent personal experience that God had led her each step of the way regarding her medical treatments. She even felt God's presence and help in small ways throughout her day. Tammy understood that whatever happened to her, God was leading her, and she could be content in that knowledge.

Benefits of Prayer to Your Health

Having an active prayer life is beneficial to your physical and emotional health. Prayer avails you not only of God's power, but also of His resources. In addition:

1. Prayer gives you freedom from anxiety, with an increased ability to cope with illness, death, or disability.

Knowing that God is in control and you are under His wings can minister to your heart, alleviating any anxious thoughts. Prayer allows you to handle life's stressful situations, such as the death of a spouse, the illness of a child, etc. Research backs this up.

One study found that those patients who had breast cancer had an increased ability to deal with their disease if they were actively involved in church activities and involved themselves in prayer. Another study came to the same conclusion in their spinal cord-injured patient population.

Deanna would agree with those study results. She was a 16-year-old acute leukemia patient. During the five previous years she had had the disease she had relapsed twice. Deanna made a point of staying involved with her church youth group and having an active prayer life. Deanna's mother knew that Deanna didn't mind having to come to her clinic appointments or receiving chemotherapy, because she felt as though her medical providers were her friends and encouragers. Usually when Deanna came for her clinic appointments she would tell her physicians of the latest events happening in her church youth group or something she was learning from God.

2. Prayer helps you deal with depression, leading to a faster recovery.

Annually depression affects nearly 10 percent of the American population over the age of 18. Many of those will attempt or commit suicide.

Laurie was a 40-year-old who was part of the faculty at a state university. She was happily married with two teenage daughters. All of a sudden her life went into a tailspin after her program director wrongly accused her of having an illicit affair and spread this gossip around to the students and other faculty members. For weeks afterward Laurie felt as though she was wearing a large scarlet "A" on her chest. She cried a lot and felt powerless to confront the program director.

Finally, after filing her faculty grievance, receiving emotional support from other faculty members as well as the faculty ombudsman, and spending time reevaluating her spiritual life, which included prayer, Laurie began to climb out of her depression. Many months after Laurie's faculty grievance was settled, the program director was finally fired.

3. Prayer leads to an increased life span and decreased mortality.

Currently in the United States the average age of life expectancy for Caucasian women is 79.7 years. For Caucasian men it is 73.8 years. These results are based on national averages compiled by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia.

Helen would laugh at those statistics. She would look at those figures and after a hearty laugh would say, "Well, it just goes to show I've beaten the norm again." Helen is 85 years old, still lives on her own, and drives to church and the shopping center. She also cleans her three-bedroom house her husband and children used to live in.

If you were to ask Helen what keeps her so spry, she would tell you her prayer life, her relationship with God, and a large amount of humor. Now, if you think that Helen has had an easy life, think again. She's survived the Great Depression, the stress of her young husband having to serve in the military during World War II, numerous personal medical problems, including a miscarriage, arthritis, asthma, and severe allergies, as well as a child who was diagnosed with epilepsy at the age of 19. Most recently she has survived the death of her husband, to whom she was wed for more than 50 years.

Nevertheless, Helen hangs on, and has made the best of her life. And when she dies, it will be with no regrets. But in Helen's mind, death is not going to happen for quite some time if she can help it.

Helen's longevity is just one example of what Drs. G. W. Comstock and J. A. Tonascia found in their study. They found an earlier age of death for those people who were not regular attendees at church services. Study participants who attended church regularly and spent time in prayer had a longer life span and a later age of death.

4. Prayer allows you to have better health overall.

A recent Duke University study of elderly people in North Carolina followed the correlation between church attendance (which included prayer) and a person's immune system. Researchers followed more than 1,700 study participants for more than six years.

A person's health is closely correlated with the overall function of their immune system. The better the immune system is functioning, the better the person's health is; therefore, study directors followed clinical lab parameters that would assess a patient's immune system. Blood samples were taken from all of the study participants at the beginning of the study and then again at the end of the study.

Lab analysis of nine cytokines (cellular markers of the immune system) were run. Researchers were especially interested in those cytokines that help to regulate the inflammatory response. If a patient had a high number of inflammatory cytokines, then their immune system response was depressed.

Researchers found a lower level of five cytokines responsible for the inflammatory response in those elderly patients who attended church and prayed. Therefore, these patients had a higher-functioning immune system than those elderly patients who did not attend church or pray.

Marcia Ory, a senior scientist at the National Institute on Aging, said that the research study went far beyond anecdotal evidence on the relationship between religious involvement and good health. She calls this pioneering study incredibly significant because it investigated the "biological linkages" between religious involvement and the immune system.

Even more recent research being done at Ohio State University has shown among Dr. Barbara Andersen's breast cancer study participants that a higher stress level significantly predicted a weakened ability of natural killer cells to surround and destroy foreign tumor cells. Ohio State researchers found evidence suggesting that "stress reduction intervention" may enhance certain aspects of the cellular immune response, important in preventing the spread of cancer from the original tumor site. These findings bolster the evidence found at Duke Medical Center. Breaking the grip of stress through intense counseling or through frequent emotionally bolstering religious involvement may indeed help strengthen our immune system.

Conclusion

Medical research has recently proven there is indeed a connection between attending religious services, personal prayer, and a person's own emotional and physical health. With the release of stress and anxiety through prayer your own health can be affected positively. It's never too late to start. So along with eating right and exercising, add the element of prayer. You won't be disappointed in the results.

Sharon Bahrych is a writer living in Englewood, Colorado.

How to Start Your Own

Prayer Life

1. Find a quiet place in your place of residence where you can go every day.

2. Read a few verses out of your Bible. You might want to start with reading the book of Psalms. Psalms is the compilation of King David's prayers and songs he made before God.

3. After you have read a small section of Scripture, spend some time in quiet reflection before God. During this time quietly say thank You to God for what He has done in your life recently.

4. Continue in your quiet reflection and prayer before God by confessing any sin you have committed and asking His forgiveness for it.

5. Ask God to supply your needs or the needs of a friend. Reflect upon these needs and ask Him to supply them, one by one.

6. Close your prayer time with a short time of praise for who God is, i.e., praise Him for His sovereignty, etc.

7. Make this time of quiet reflection a daily event in your life. Make a commitment to it.