Day 513 - November 10 - Status Update

I was looking back through some of the posts I've made here over the last few months, and I don't remember if I ever gave y'all an update on a request I made back in September. I had made a request for someone with some design and fabrication skills to help with getting Connor a few things that we can't seem to find anywhere.

Well, in case I didn't ever tell you, a friend of ours stepped up and has been very busy doing some fabrication to help solve one of Connor's accessibility problems. I'll make sure to tell you about it once it's complete, but I wanted to let you know that some progress is being made in at least one area to help make Connor's life just a bit easier. Thanks for the help, Joey! We can't wait to see it in action!

As for the boy himself, well, we can't wait to see him back in action either! He's been having a rough few days again - it seems he's got another chest cold or something - once again he's having difficulty with staying saturated with oxygen.

You know, the Bible says that the effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man is a powerful thing. Read James 5:13-18. Do you ever think of your prayers as "working", as in "The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working"? Most of the time we tend to think of our prayers floating up to God somewhere like the smoke of incense or something, but that's not what the Bible tells us they do. It tells us that they're working. As in "getting something done". As in "digging in their heels and finishing the job".

Now here's the word picture for the day - I tinker around a little bit with my motorcycles, and I can do some of the routine maintenance like changing tires and oil and stuff like that. I use tools for that, like wrenches and sockets and screwdrivers and such. Now, most of the time, when I want to say, take off a tire, I'll put a wrench on the axle nut and turn it. But every once in a while, for whatever reason, the nut won't turn easily. So the first thing I do is set my body and shoulder and try to turn the nut with more force. In other words, I try more fervently. Sometimes that works, sometimes not. Now when it still won't turn, I've got a thing called a cheater bar, which is just a six-foot-long piece of pipe that will fit over the handle of my socket wrench. The extra length gives me the leverage necessary to turn the nut and remove the wheel. But it's the image of "trying harder" that I want to capture here, because it conveys the idea of fervency very well. There's a moment in that struggle where every muscle I can bring to bear is straining against that nut. Every fiber of my thought is focused on that nut. The concentration and effort are so great that I've busted a sweat trying to get stuff like that done.

That's "fervent".

Do you pray like that for Connor? Do I? Do our prayers for him qualify as "fervent" prayers? Honestly, most of the time I think the answer is "no". It's hard to maintain that level of effort. But it stands to reason that greater needs require greater effort, just like that axle nut sometimes needs more oomph behind the wrench to start turning. And I think that sometimes our fervency gets lost in the day-to-day job of getting things done. So I want to go back to that. I want to go back to anguished petition to my Lord for my son's healing. I want you to do that with me.

It says in Acts 12 that when Peter was imprisoned by Herod, "earnest prayer" was being lifted up by the church for him. And an angel showed up and rescued him. But the interesting part, to me, is that Herod had arrested Peter and then held him for a week or more, right up until the last night before Peter was to be delivered up to the Jews, before the angel appeared. The church was praying earnestly for Peter the whole time, but it wasn't until the last night that Peter was released.

Don't give up on Connor's healing. The time is apparently not ripe, but it's coming. Continue to lift the boy up fervently with me.

It availeth much.

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