Prayer has always shaped the rhythm of Rev. Vanessa M. Wilson’s life. But in 2018, when she received a cancer diagnosis, something different happened. She had an unexpected prayer experience that changed her. This is the story of that experience, and how it informs Wilson’s life and prayer practice to this day.
An Unsettling Diagnosis
In the fall of 2018, Wilson was at the height of her game. She graduated in the spring with her Master of Divinity from Drew Theological School, began preparing for ordination with the Board of Ordained Ministry (BoOM) in the summer, returned to consulting, and entered a Master of Sacred of Theology program in September.
In October, as a part of completing the BoOM medical report, Wilson decided to have a mammogram although it was not required. Then, in November, Wilson traveled to South Carolina to lead a team of clergy facilitators in a large-scale clergy training for the African Methodist Episcopal Church as a consultant.
While she was there, Wilson received the phone call no one ever wants to receive. Results from a biopsy following the mammogram revealed that she had breast cancer.
While hearing those words would be difficult for anyone, for Wilson, they instantly brought up memories of caring for both of her parents through cancer diagnoses and ultimately, of losing them both to the disease. “Hearing that…was unsettling,” she recalls, “because the first thing that ran through my mind was my parents and then my sons. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I lost my parents when I was young and I did not want my sons to lose me. Too many thoughts and emotions were flooding through my mind. Both head and heart were filled with uncertainty.” Wilson didn’t know if or how she would be able to do the work she was there to do with the weight of this news on her mind.
Not Business as Usual
But determined that ‘the show must go on,’ with or without her, Wilson gathered her facilitators to instruct them on how to proceed if she was unable to keep her bearings. “I definitely have a Northeast business mindset – we had a contract … so nothing stops this,” she recalled.
However, Wilson was taken aback when one of the young clergymen in the group spoke up: “This is not business as usual. You have a cancer diagnosis. We’re going to pray for you.”
This is what happened next, in Wilson’s own words:
I can’t remember the beginning of the prayer, but they gathered around me and it was so intense that I fell out and two of the clergy women…picked me up, held me, rocked me and sang, while the others continued to pray. They prayed until the room was filled up with a cloud. … Before I fell, the pastor who initiated the prayer put his hand on my stomach, and I felt pain and anxiety – draining. It wasn’t the pain and anxiety of that moment because I did not have pain associated with cancer. I felt that it was the pain and the anxiety of a lifetime. The pastor went into the corner of the room, and started screaming and crying and I felt like I had cried. I felt the catharsis.
Wilson describes the prayer as supernatural and unexpected. Though she had grown up with a heavy focus on prayer in her childhood home, was serving as a pastor, and had visited churches of different traditions throughout her life, this was not the kind of prayer Wilson knew. The Spirit embodied her and the intercessors. It had a depth that transcended time and space.
“You know, I’ve seen these things on television…and sometimes I believe it, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I think it’s theater,” she admits. Yet she could not deny her own experience: “This wasn’t theater. It was real…. When the prayer was over…I was different. I was just different and really in many ways I’ve never been the same.”
A Lasting Transformation
In the weeks and months that followed, the experience of that prayer sustained Wilson. She sensed a radical freedom from the fears that naturally accompany a cancer diagnosis: “I left that room [in South Carolina] and really haven’t been concerned about cancer,” she said. “I think that prayer laid the foundation for what was going to come.”
What came was not easy. Wilson underwent various chemotherapies, including one nicknamed the “red devil” for the severity of its side effects – illness, hair loss, neuropathy requiring her feet to be packed with ice. Still, the tumor did not shrink significantly. Wilson then had a mastectomy and a lymph node dissection removing seven lymph nodes. Then she underwent radiation.
Meanwhile, the financial burden of treatment required Wilson to leave her home and move into her student apartment at Drew Theological School—what had once served only as a convenient place to stay over when the commute home was too much. One of her adult sons moved into the apartment to care for her. The other son, then a Drew student and now a local pastor in the Greater New Jersey Annual Conference, also moved on campus. COVID-19 delayed the necessary reconstructive treatment and surgeries. Wilson was sustained by prayer during this time of uncertainty.
For some, the challenges that Wilson experienced might have served as evidence that God had not responded—at least not favorably—to the prayers of those who had surrounded her in South Carolina, or to the many other prayers lifted by and on behalf of Wilson in those months.
But for Wilson, that was not the case. The prayer was transformative. No, God did not magically make the cancer disappear, nor was treatment smooth sailing, but God gave Wilson an unspeakable peace and assurance through it. “There is a place of knowing in Christ where you don’t know the outcome. But you know that you’re anchored.”
In addition to this deep sense of peace, God surrounded Wilson with the support of loving people—her family and friends, her churches, the Drew Theological and Caspersen School community, and her phenomenal medical team.
God’s gifts through this tremendous prayer experience not only sustained Wilson through cancer treatment, but also transformed her understanding and practice of prayer, even to this day.
Before that experience of catharsis and deep inner healing, Wilson explains, “I would have believed that if I prayed hard enough and I lived right, then it should have been a different outcome. At some point, the cancer should have gone away, the tumor should have shrunk, you know, something should have happened to minimize the pain, the loss, the lingering impact of cancer.”
Now though, she no longer prays solely from her own understanding but brings her petitions to God with an attitude of yielding, like that articulated in the Wesley Covenant Prayer. “My expectation of prayer now is ‘let thy will be done,’” she says. The reason? “We’re looking in a very straight line…but God sees around the corner. God sees what we don’t see. …I know God’s going to work something out. I know it’s going to be for the good. I don’t know how or when but in all things the kingdom come.”
Grace Extended
Wilson’s mention of the “kingdom” points to a larger truth: while her transformation through prayer has been deeply personal and interior, it hasn’t stayed there. It has rippled outward through relationships, extending God’s grace into the world.
The possibility that her experience might bless others was also a seed planted on the day of Wilson’s lifechanging experience in South Carolina. During that time of prayer, a woman approached Wilson and shared that she also had cancer. The woman had prayed for her own physical healing and not received it. However, the woman became an inspiration to others during her medical treatments including inspiring her nurse to return to church after speaking about her faith while under anesthesia! Following from her own experience, she told Wilson, “You may not be healed of this cancer but whatever it is, know that it’s for God’s glory.”
“At the time I heard it but I couldn’t embrace it,” Wilson shares. Without downplaying the seriousness of her illness or the injustice of suffering, she adds, “But now, I can see how having any bad thing happen to you can be for God’s glory because of the people you meet along the way.”
Indeed, as Wilson journeyed through cancer treatments, she met people—nurses, doctors, other patients—who encouraged her and whom she, in turn, encouraged. In addition to these daily, personal interactions, Wilson also found opportunities to share her experience more publicly.
A week ahead of her mastectomy, she had a “Boob Voyage Party” – a time of both education and spiritual edification for family and friends. She presented a paper at Harvard Medical School about the importance of spirituality and health. “That environment was moved—,” shared Wilson, “scientists and doctors…they were moved by my talking about the power of prayer.” She has also presented at John Hopkins and the University of Pennsylvania and she continues to be in conversation with leaders in the AME church about the 2018 prayer. It was transformational for many.
Now Wilson is more focused; when she graduated from Drew, she prayed about getting through BoOM, more opportunities to speak and train clergy, to learn Hebrew. She believes that because she sought to build the kingdom, her cancer was discovered just in time. She is acutely aware of the devastation of cancer and realizes that each day is a gift and desires that her life is in God’s perfect will.
Rev. Vanessa M. Wilson’s story reminds us that prayer is not a transaction or a guarantee, but an encounter that can reorient a life. The prayer that surrounded her in Florence, South Carolina did not remove cancer or spare her suffering, but it grounded her in a peace deeper than fear and a trust strong enough to carry her through uncertainty.
Wilson’s experience bears witness to a faith that yields outcomes to God, trusting that even in what we would never choose, God is still at work—around the corner, beyond our sight, and always for the sake of love and the flourishing of the kingdom.