Tuesday, January 1, 2008

Learning to Pray for the Disabled

I am a full time minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. There is a field right in my house. And even though I work in disability ministry at College Church, my first ministry is 2 doors down from my bedroom.

So you may be asking "How does one pray for a disabled child who communicates in a very limited way, cannot share experiences, or make quality judgments, or tell you he is hot or cold, or that he feels sick, or even pray himself? I tell you, it takes a lot of faith. You have to believe in the sovereignty of God, because only He could arrange circumstances to benefit the child. You have to believe in the goodness of God, because he makes all things beautiful in their time. "Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart, " says Psalm 37:4, was a good verse that gave me wings of faith. Based on life experiences with God leading me to my wife, bringing us children, and a house I did not build nor was really able to afford, I found no problem with praying consistently for Dave. I prayed that God would use him in some way, perhaps unseen or mysterious, for His kingdom. It turns out that God has answered in ways that are rather obvious, a lavish surprise of grace. He has been "memorizing" Scripture for "Project Isaiah" (chapters 40-66) with me as I work through it myself. Now we can trade reciting parts of verses back and forth. We're talking LARGE blocks of the book of Isaiah. The Director of our church's Disability Ministries, Dawn Clark, knows about this, and she and her staff have been blessed. This is all besides the fact that our home has the Word ringing in it very much of the time. I am thinking about the evangelistic possibilities with Dave as well. And as a late update, I asked Dave to recite some of what he knows to our auto mechanic.

All I did was pray consistently. God did it all! I want to state that clearly. Cry out to him and ask him to show you great and mighty things you do not yet know.

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