Brutally honest with God…

My brother just wrote in his blog about two miracles that have happened in his life. He asked people to write in and share theirs. I shared mine, but it got me to thinking.

There have been plenty of times in my life when God has answered my prayers, but those times are not as many as the requests that I have made of Him. Yes… like everyone else out there, God doesn’t answer all of my prayers… at least not with a “yes.” But I am sometimes almost surprised when He does, because they are often the times when I am not feeling “super spiritual”… when my request wasn’t made fluently… when I wasn’t filled with faith, etc. Many of the requests that He seems to specifically answer with a clear “yes” are those made out of desperation… when I’m at the end of my rope and I don’t even know what to pray, let alone what to do. When I’m past telling myself to trust Him… when I’m beyond arguing with myself whether my prayer is being prayed in faith or not… when I just blurt out what’s in my heart. It’s not like He doesn’t already know exactly what’s there anyway.

I’ll just copy over the miracle testimony that I left on my brother’s blog, as an example… it’s not a spectacular testimony like people like to hear, but it’s REAL… real in that it happened to my husband and I, and real because it happened through – and in spite of – our doubts and uncertainty. I still don’t know why God chose to answer these prayers, but the answer started when I was brutally honest with God and admitted our failings… when I prayed a prayer so frank that it might have been termed more of a challenge than a prayer. But He honored it!

My husband has had difficulties with his knees for years. Well, 2-3 years ago, one of them started giving him lots of pain and swelling occasionally, to the point that it was getting difficult to work and drive, etc. Finally he went to a doctor, who ordered a knee MRI, and then told him that he had torn the meniscus under his kneecap and he needed surgery, because they did not heal themselves. He had two options, one of which would be major surgery, cost a ton, and he’d have to take anywhere from 2-4 MONTHS off of work. That repair job might last him most of his life, but it wasn’t likely. The other option would be a slightly less major surgery, cost only half a ton, require only 4-6 weeks off of work… and perhaps not even take care of the problem. If it did, then it would only be temporary.

I, of course, didn’t want us to go through either. Either would have entailed even more pain, neither would fix things completely, he wouldn’t have done well at ALL trying to stay off of his feet for months, and I would have had to get a job to make ends meet. It just seemed so much better if God would just heal it. Of course, we asked Him to do this, but we didn’t have any ground-breaking revelations giving us certainty, etc.

My husband talked about it and thought about it for a while, and finally decided that he didn’t have much choice other than to have the surgery, because he couldn’t hardly work as it was. I remember standing in church when prayer requests were being taken and his father (our pastor at the time) included his knee in the list. As he was praying for it, I stood there, knowing that my husband didn’t have any faith that it was going to be healed, and not even sure that I did. So I prayed quite frankly with God. I said, “God, I know You can heal his knee, but if You are really going to do it, then You’ve got to find a way to tell him Yourself and stop the surgery, because he won’t believe it from anyone else.” Nothing spectacular happened, and the day went on.

That very night my husband woke me up to tell me about a dream he had just had. I won’t explain the whole thing out, but suffice it to say that God seems to speak to my husband’s family through dreams, and He had sent one to my husband that night. My husband ended the conversation by telling me that he wasn’t going to go through with the surgery. At that point, he still had no faith that it would be healed… he hadn’t gotten that far… he just knew that the surgery would be a mistake. I, however, knew that God had answered my prayer, and therefore He was going to heal the knee. I just didn’t know when or how.

Weeks went by (I don’t remember how many), and his knee still bothered him, although not as much. Then we had a visiting pastor come. After the service, he asked who needed prayer. Everyone was stubbornly holding back and not going forward, as usual, so God started telling him what problems people had that needed prayer. One of the things that God told him was that someone had problems with their knee and God had healed it. I think He even specified which knee. Well… my husband knew that was him, and he apparently received it… he has had absolutely no problems with that knee since. *smiles* (We’ll see what happens with the other knee which still bothers him mildly every once in a while. See… told you this was a real story.)