I Prayed, But It Didn’t Happen The Way I Wanted!
I went to a funeral or a home going service this week. The deceased person was a woman of God who was attacked with some type of disease in her body and succumbed to it. But how could this be if she was believing God would heal her? Doesn’t the Word promise us healing if we only believe?
I went with a lot of questions. Why didn’t God heal her? Was she believing to be healed until the day she died? What happens to our faith in situations like this? The service was at her church and from its reputation, is a good bible teaching church, so what happened?
During the service I learned from those speaking that she had been believing God to be healed, but in the last weeks of her life she decided that she wanted to go be with God instead. That only brought more questions to my mind. What happened to make her change her mind? As a woman of God she knew the power of God and what it could do. She has kids & grandkids, why would she want to leave them?
I immediately started talking to God about it. I knew this was a decision that she and God had the right to make, so why did it bother me so much? My soul was vexed & heavy because this was putting pressure on my definition of healing; then came spirits of doubt & unbelief. Should I now stop believing because it doesn’t work anyway? How do you know?
So in addition to talking to God, I started talking to other believers who are living by Faith like me. I even talked to my Pastor about it because He has always been straight up and direct with me.
Here’s what I re-discovered or what was brought back to the forefront of my mind:
There will be things in this life that will happen that you didn’t want to happen. There will be times when it seems that your prayers are not being answered the way you want them to be answered. There will be many things that don’t make sense to your definition of God’s ways or His word. God tells us that in Isaiah 55:8-9:
8 For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, says the Lord. 9 For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.
So what do you do when you’ve got questions & not enough answers? What do you do when things don’t make sense to you? I’ve decided to continue to do what I decided to do the first time I found myself in this place. I believe God anyway. I believe that He knows what I don’t. I’ll believe even when I don’t get what I want, the way I want.
God reminded me of a conversation that I once had with a gentlemen from my former church who was in the hospital fighting a sickness in his lungs. I asked him how his fight was going and I will never forget his response. He said that he was believing God for his body to be healed, but also felt that he could also get the victory in this battle if he decided to die. That shook me because that didn’t line up with my definition of “being healed”. How could there be a victory in death? Well, as he explained it, if God didn’t heal his body he would still be victorious over this demon of disease because in shedding the diseased body, he would get a new one free from the demon and he would also get to be with God too! He felt he had done what God sent him to earth to do and he could choose “going home” to be with God if he wanted to. Either way he wins!
That challenged what I believed but it also opened my eyes to other perspectives. As believers we have to evaluate & re-evaluate what we believe & why? My definition of healing is total restoration of the physical problem. But is that the only definition? Of course not. You are free to believe it the way God gives it to you. Demons of religion keep people bound & stuck in believing only its set of definitions. That’s a cult. No matter how hard it may seem, we have to keep our hearts open toward God so we can learn – add to and take away things as we learn from God.
The guy Iater died and because he felt it was a victory for him, so did I.
I don’t know about you, but I like having & knowing all the answers, and I want to know them up front. But, I have to accept that in a lot of cases that may not happen.There will be some answers that I will never get while I live in this earth suit and I have to accept that, but I can not and will not let it affect my faith in what I know to be true. I know I don’t know it all, but there is a lot I do know & I choose to work the Word I do know and flow in the power that it brings to my life. I don’t lean to my own limited understanding deferring always to God according to Proverbs 3:5-6:
5 Lean on, trust in, and be confident in the Lord with all your heart and mind and do not rely on your own insight or understanding. 6 In all your ways know, recognize, and acknowledge Him, and He will direct and make straight and plain your paths.
So I choose to believe anyway. I choose to keep my spirit open to God so He can fill it with the things He wants & needs me to know. I have worked God’s Word on purpose too many times in my life so I know its power to change things to make them better.
So don’t worry about what you don’t know, keep your heart open to learn, but work what you do know and God will meet you where you are. Because no matter what happens I choose to walk by faith and not by sight.
2 Corinthians 5:7 –For we walk by faith [we regulate our lives and conduct ourselves by our conviction or belief respecting man’s relationship to God and divine things, with trust and holy fervor; thus we walk ] not by sight or appearance.
What about you? What do you do when things don’t happen the way you want them to?
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This has giving me understanding, on Healing. I really liked this nI like that you went into detail on you’re explanation.