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(OPINION) Last week I wrote about Vickie, a parishioner who recently died of cancer. I talked about her journey to faith and how that faith ultimately buoyed her and others during her illness.

Something I didn’t deal with, however, was the ancient, difficult question of what role prayer and religion ultimately play in dealing with sickness and suffering.

Does God heal people? If so, why doesn’t he heal more of them? In her death, Vickie surely inspired those of us who knew her, but why did she have to die at all?

In the New Testament, the writer James makes a thrilling promise:

“Is anyone among you sick? Then he must call for the elders of the church and they are to pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord; and the prayer offered in faith will restore the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up, and if he has committed sins, they will be forgiven him.”

My dad, then a Southern Baptist preacher, was diagnosed with terminal cancer in the 1970s. A neurosurgeon told me Dad had a “zero” chance of recovery.

But my father decided to follow James’ instructions. He asked his congregation’s members to anoint him with oil and pray. Within 48 hours, his cancer spontaneously vanished. His doctors were flabbergasted. He lived 35 more years cancer free, and died of old age.

After Dad’s healing, my parents, my sister and I, and roughly half of Dad’s congregation converted from Baptists into faith-healing Pentecostals. We had no doubt that if you were sick, you could just call the elders, get anointed and — bang — you’d be cured.

Except that’s not how it turned out. We prayed for a lot of people. I’ve got to tell you, most of them didn’t get well.

Sorry, James.

I still believe almost 50 years later that my father was divinely healed. I was there. I saw it. But I also believe that what happened to him was a once-in-a-thousand-prayers miracle. A miracle of biblical proportions. It was not the norm.

Why him? Who knows? I sure don’t.

There have been numerous double-blind scientific studies regarding the power of prayer over sickness. In 2009, two scientists published a meta-analysis of the studies conducted up to that time. They found the results of the research to be all over the map.

“Prayer has been reported to improve outcomes in human as well as nonhuman species, to have no effect on outcomes, to worsen outcomes and to have retrospective healing effects,” they wrote. “For a multitude of reasons, research on the healing effects of prayer is riddled with assumptions, challenges and contradictions that make the subject a scientific and religious minefield. We believe that the research has led nowhere, and that future research, if any, will forever be constrained by the scientific limitations that we outline.”

Bottom line: Scientifically speaking, who knows?

This week I was tidying up the way-too-many files on my computer’s desktop — or, more accurately, I was trying to avoid writing. I happened across a newspaper article I’d saved last October and forgotten.

The piece was called, “What science says about the power of religion and prayer to heal.” Its author, Robert Klitzman, is a psychiatrist and director of the Masters of Bioethics program at Columbia University.

Klitzman studied the relationship between prayer and illness by interviewing hospital chaplains of various stripes, including Christians, Jews, Muslims and secular humanists. He concluded that religion and prayer did lead to improved medical outcomes.

But the relationship was subtle. What he reported didn’t fit into bromides such as, “God heals” or “prayer works” or, for that matter, “there is no God.”

Spiritual practices don’t necessarily cause physical improvements, he reported. They do help patients cope psychologically with their illnesses.

You might say prayer and faith can ease the journey even if they don’t change the destination.

Here are four specific ways religion helps, he said:

— Brain changes: “Research shows that strong religious or spiritual beliefs are associated with thicker parts of the brain, providing neuronal reserves that can buffer against depression and despair.”

— Purpose: “Religion and spirituality, broadly defined, provide a sense of meaning, purpose and hope.”

— Meaning: “Many patients come to find or construct their own sources of meaning.”

— Social support: “Religious and spiritual groups also commonly provide valuable social support and interactions.”

Certainly, I saw all those dimensions working in Vickie.

I don’t know anything about neuronal reserves, but I can tell you I never saw in her any evidence of depression. Bad days and bad moods, sure. Through it all, though, she mainly stayed upbeat and even joyous. She knew she was dying, but felt largely OK with that.

She expressed both purpose and meaning. She prayed for the ability to reflect God’s love to others despite her illness. She believed the Lord was using her as a witness of his grace even as her life ebbed away. She even experienced a mystical vision that for her unlocked many cosmic mysteries; she thought it was a divine gift.

Plus she was surrounded day and night by church people who loved her, who wanted her to know it and who tried to ease her passing.

There’s no doubt her faith in God made a difference. She wasn’t healed, but, for her, what Jesus promised came true: “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end.”

Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.