The Power of Prayer

We went up to visit my Mom in Virginia a couple weeks ago and while I was there I was looking for some bedtime reading material and stumbled across the book 90 Minutes in Heaven by Don Piper.  I wasn't really sure what to expect when I opened it up but the words on the cover, "a true story of death and life", sounded right up my alley.

It is a very easy read and it is quite captivating from the beginning.  Without giving away any of the big highlights, it can be easily summed up as the true story of a minister that died in a horrible car accident.  He went to heaven and writes about his experience there.  While he was in heaven, a fellow minister happened upon the car accident and felt the need to pray for the dead guy.  His prayer worked and the dead guy started singing.  Intrigued yet?  :)

The story is fast paced and correlates some great bible verses with each part of this miracle journey.  As I read the book, I couldn't help but think of how it loosely parallels with our pregnancy journey with Will.  Sometimes it seemed that there just wasn't anything anyone could do to make all of the "problems" go away.  They thought he had fractures in utero...they thought his chest size was incompatible with life...they thought my bleeding issues may tear away the placenta....  The odds seemed so stacked against us.  BUT, prayer intervened.  We were fortunate enough to have prayer warriors across the globe praying for Will.  Asking for a miracle.  Praying so, so hard for us.  And guess what?  It worked.

This verse from the book summed it up perfectly and I found myself just reading it over and over again last week...

And we can be confident that he will listen to us whenever we ask him for anything in line with his will.  And if we know he is listening when we make our requests, we can be sure that he will give us what we ask for.  I John 5:14-15

Wow.  I prayed so, so, so many times that God's will be done for our sweet boy.  I knew what my heart desired, but I also knew that God already had a plan for Will.  If that plan was for us to bring him home, then so be it.  But if God's will was to take him to heaven, then we would find a way to make peace with it.  It's just so amazing when I think back on all of the medical conversations about Will and how pessimistic all of the doctors were...  In the end, none of it mattered.  Why?  Because prayer works.  We asked that His will be done...we asked for a miracle...and here he is.  Praise God.