With tears in my eyes I turn away from the small house out onto the dirt road and into the shade. A teammate comforts me as the impact of what just happened settles. We just prayed for a sixteen year old boy with Chronic Kidney Disease. A boy who’s had eight operations on his kidneys and now requires dialysis. Dialysis, a treatment that acts as a mechanical kidney that filters his blood for him. Dialysis, a place he has to travel to 3 times a week and sit in a chair for 4 hours each time. A disease that doesn’t allow him to play outside and be active like any other sixteen year old boys his age. The ones who are shooting sling shots and running around in the hot, dusty fields playing “football.”
The old Aubrey would have taken those emotions she was feeling and shoved them back down, to not surface or be felt. She wouldn’t have felt the longing in his eyes to be better, the strength he had in him to persevere, felt the courage and boldness in his faith. She wouldn’t have been sensitive to the Holy Spirits prompting to pray over him the characteristics of King David. She would have looked at this boy and treated him like any other dialysis patient she had come across in the hospital where she worked as a Registered Dietitian. Emotions connected to each patient were not something I could afford in a work place that was filled with it day in and day out. This day was different. This boy was different. God’s redemption is real and it met me here on this day praying over this boy. A boy whom I found out after praying for him, was named David.
I walked away from that house not with tears of sadness, but tears of joy. Tim Kellers book Walking with God through Pain and Suffering says –
“Look at Jesus. He was perfect, right? And yet he goes around crying all the time. He is always weeping, a man of sorrows. Do you know why? Because he is perfect. Because when you are not all absorbed in yourself, you can feel the sadness of the world. And therefore, what you actually have is that the joy of the Lord happens inside the sorrow. It doesn’t come after the sorrow. It doesn’t come after the uncontrollable weeping. The weeping drives you into the joy, it enhances the joy, and then the joy enables you to actually feel your grief without its sinking you.”
David is already so beautifully walking in that joy because he is living life for Christ. King David said in psalms 16:11 “You will show me the way of life, granting me the joy of your presence, and the pleasures of living with you forever.”
There can never be enough prayers that David can receive. I ask for you reading this to share some of your joy in prayer for David as he perseveres through this disease. Know you and David are both connected through the Holy Spirit, a gift Christ gave when he died for you and me.
