A Sorrowful Taint of Long Disuse

Shouldn't I have felt something then, standing at the alter. My hand resting on the smallish neck of a brittle woman. I remembered the verses I had read about Christ healing the paralitic, about Peter and John meeting the lame man on their way to the temple. Of the faith of the friends who lowered their friend through the roof of a house to reach Jesus. I couldn't look this woman in the eyes. Could not, as I prayed, bring myself to gaze into her eyes and see her desperation, because deep down in side I believed that she would not be healed, and dispite all my praying it would come to nothing. I had failed before I had even begun and lost the battle for her from the start.
I believe have hit a wall in my faith and I have been standing looking at it for years. It's solid stone, at least three hundred feet high and over 75 feet thick. I am faithful to push at it. To throw my weight against it and check for weaknesses, but inevitibly I walk away defeated, looking back over my shoulders at the impossibility of moving God to action. I really wish I knew some montra or incantation that would encite God to act, to heal as he did in the past. I have witness a good number of miracles done on the inside of a body, but never anything done to a person with no legs. How would that work? Back to the barrier.
Leif Enger said it so well in his book "Peace Like a River" of the tramp in his back yard. "I remember the smells of cold fire, old sandwhich meat, and another that was new to me then... a sorrowful taint as of long disuse." I find it oddly fitting of my situation and fitting of the church here in America. We have been so little accustomed to the things of the spirit and the acutal close encounters with God that we have become that locked room. That stale odor of misuse. It's hard to believe in light when you have lived covered by a blanket for all your life.
This time I recognize my wall. I recognize the barrier that I have in my heart and mind and I will begin the push. The slow exersize of muscle and mind and heart. The arrythmic streaching of my faith. Where now I see a wall, I shall see a fallen Jericho.