Three days of passionate prayer for Pavel. Three days of pressing in. Three days of standing in the gap. Three nights of fervent corporate prayer. I have never before experienced anything that felt so powerful. I could feel God moving around us. Pavel believed with all his heart and all his soul that God would heal him, and by the third night, he said that his leg was feeling less pain, and the swelling had gone down a bit. Our prayers were working!
And then came the day we were sure God was going to use to prove how mighty He is. The day we dropped Pavel and his mother off at the hospital. We were off working on another project (Extreme Home Make-over, Romania Style), and waiting expectantly for news on Pavel. When Becky got the call, it was not the one we were expecting, not the call we had been praying to get for three days. It was not the call telling us that the doctors were confused and that the cancer was gone, that Pavel was healed and ready to go home and shout from the rooftop of every house in his village that God had healed him. That isn’t the phone call we got. The doctors said that the cancer had returned. That Pavel’s leg would have to be amputated just above the knee, but they couldn’t say for certain that the cancer hadn’t already spread to the rest of his body. If that was the case, he would need to go through chemotherapy (again), and that even then, his chances of surviving long enough to see his eighteenth birthday were nearly nonexistent.
Dejected and a little angry, a few of us slumped down on a couch and started to fuss like cranky 4 years olds. We wanted to know… if God isn’t going to heal Pavel (Paul in English), a young man whose cup of faith runneth over, then who will He heal? There was some frustration at God. We didn’t just lay hands on Pavel for a few minutes one evening, we prayed hard for three days. And just before we took him to the hospital, we were at a Pentecostal church where a congregation of several hundred people prayed for him for a long time.
But it wasn’t enough. Three days of intense prayer wasn’t enough for Pavel. This fifteen year old boy has to have his leg amputated to try to save his life.
