A Prayer of Faith

Thanks to Stephanie, one of our guest writers, for submitting this piece.

I watched an interesting movie the other night with my husband. It was a movie of a loving family who is almost torn apart by the challenges of dealing with their son’s epilepsy. It is stressful enough dealing with the daily grand mal seizures that bring him close to death on more than one occasion. But, in addition, this young boy endures experimental treatments with numerous untested and unproven drugs. Some of the drugs have horrendous side effects that make the boy sicker, and could cause major retardation or even death. Stress is also imposed as doctors try to coerce the parents into exploratory brain surgery for their son, which would involve removing his scalp, and again could put him at risk for permanent damage or death.

After all of this heartache and suffering, and after watching her son deal with one side effect of the drugs after another, the mother does some research and discovers a treatment that could be used on her son: a special diet to help control his seizures. She asks the doctor about trying the diet and the doctor is reluctant. The mother requests that they at least try it so that their son could have one more chance before having to resort to surgery. The doctor refuses to help. Eventually, with the help of a friend who is also a medical doctor, they are able to fly the boy to Johns Hopkins Medical Center and begin this controversial diet. The diet is strict and regimented, but ends up helping the boy to become free from side effects of these drugs as he is slowly weaned from them. (It turns out that this diet works for many children with epilepsy.) The doctors at John Hopkins treat him like a normal boy, and eventually he resumes his normal life and stays seizure-free.

This family didn’t have the necessary information to help their son because the doctors only provided information that THEY wanted to use and nothing else. The doctors, trained to only use one form of treatment, were not open-minded enough to use anything else, at great detriment to this young boy’s life and his family’s quality of life.

For some reason this reminded me of something that we as humans do. We are all too often unbending and unwilling to do something different than what we have always done. We keep doing the same thing over and over and continue to get the same results each time, often to our detriment.

This made me think of a scripture that has been on my heart lately:

“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28-30).

Often answers to our problems, small or great, can have easy solutions, especially as we call on the Lord for rest and lay our burdens completely at His feet. How many times do we struggle and whine and complain and moan that things are so hard, but we ourselves are the ones making them harder by not looking for the simpler solution? In our world of modern technology, with the click of a mouse, we have instant information at our fingertips. How often do we rely on that before we rely on the Lord? How often do we turn to worldly advice and voices before we heed the simple plan of Jesus? How often do we come up with extra rules and special rules (as the Pharisees had done) instead of following Jesus and turning our hearts over to Him and letting Him lead us?

Jesus promises us that His yoke is easy and His burden is light! It is not heavy! It is not difficult! We must believe Him. We must take Him at His word.

I think that taking his yoke upon us refers to following His will for us, praying to know what He wants us to do, and obeying Him. Our hearts need to be knit with Christ. We must learn to surrender to Jesus. We give up our autonomy, our power, and our own ideas. This involves a submission and humility on our part. But if we can lose the stubbornness, the arrogance, and the things that blind us, we can rest in His care and in His will.

In reading these verses, I thought about what each word means to me, and came up with this:

Follow in Jesus, every soul who is weary, and stressed and depressed, for Jesus does give everyone peace. Accept Jesus’ name on your heart and come to know His gospel, for Jesus is gentle and humble with a contrite heart, and you will discover peace in your spirit. For His words are not hard and His gospel is not burdensome.

If we love Jesus, we will follow Him. We will do nothing but what He wills for us. We will obey His commandments because we love Him, and in turn He will give us peace to our hearts and we will experience a joy and love that we can find nowhere else in this world. Instead of us relying on the difficult things that do not produce solutions, He will supply the answers to those problems. We will still have trials and challenges each day, but our hearts will be turned towards Him and we will feel the peace that only He can give.

Those who know Stephanie well would describe her as a deep thinker, a student of life, and a home schooling mother to five small children. She has been sealed to her best friend, Jeffrey, for seven years. She enjoys singing and writing. When she was young she loved to ‘play’ by herself writing books and stories or play ’school’ with her five younger brothers who were forced to be her pupils, or perform on her karaoke machine recording songs. She could always be found with her nose in a book. Nowadays her children and husband are her audience and her nose is still in a book, usually one she is reading to her children.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 4th, 2006 at 5:23 am and is filed under Every Word. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.