"I think your prayers have saved my boys life"

The world is not as it was originally meant to be. This is the inescapable, sad reality that people face day in day out. Evil and Suffering of many differing forms fill our news, there is no escaping it - the world is in a mess. But for Christians, this isn't the end of the story - we know why bad things happen, we know that God loves us, and we know we have an amazing life ahead of us in perfect relationship with God in a perfect place, where there will be no evil and no suffering.

But reality is, until Jesus returns the world remains broken. Thankfully we can pray to our loving heavenly Father who is able to do all things and who knows personally the pain of suffering.

Though, I don't know about you, but sometimes I feel afraid of telling friends who aren't yet Christian that I'll pray for them... just in case the prayer isn't answered in the way we'd like: What if they think that God doesn't exist because prayers haven't been answered?! How little a view of God we have!

I met with a friend this evening, she knows the world is broken, she wakes up to it each morning with the beeping of the hospital monitors, the murmuring of the machine that feeds her son, not to mention the whirling noise of the Chemo (or poison as she calls it) entering her teenage son's body. Day in and day out, evil and suffering stares her straight in the face, there is no escaping it. This is just one story, my heart broke this evening as I heard the stories of the children who have died this week on the ward, or of her sons best friend in the hospital who has been rushed into ICU and is unlikely to make it through the night.

9 months ago when I told my friend that I was praying for her family, she froze, there was an awkward silence, she changed the subject and walked away. Praise God that 9 months on things have changed.

In the midst of this suffering my friend explained to me how she is now certain that it is only because people have been praying for her son that he is still alive. "He should be dead", "The cancer should have killed him", "Even the consultants didn't think he'd make it", "Its amazing that the 50cm tumour hasn't spread anywhere else in his body", "Why is my boy still alive when so many of the other children on the ward have died?"... these little coincidences could go on and on. But she now see's that maybe there there is a God who answer's prayers, these aren't just coincidences. What a great God we have, my prayer is that through this tough time, somehow God would continue to lavish his grace and mercy onto this family and bring them into his Kingdom.

As I drove this evening I has mixed emotions. Of course there is sadness for what the family is going through. But I'm excited about the work of God in the lives of this family. Part of me was encouraged to pray more and more and to trust God to work in the ways He see's best, to know that he is sovereign over the lives of our friends - not me. My friends comments tonight also reminded me not to be fearful of sharing with people that we're praying for them. Just yesterday great fear went through me as I sent a text explaining that I was praying for her family, knowing that in the past this kind of message has not been well received. Yet, tonight, even though she calls her self an atheist, she is comforted by the idea that people are praying for her, and she wants people to be praying. Because she is aware that people are praying, she is attributing great things to God and is now far more open to the Gospel. Even though some prayers haven't been answered the way we would have liked (her son still had to have his leg amputated), my friend is focusing on the ways God has answered prayers. For this I praise God.