foolish and persistent.

Let’s see.

I went for a run about 4:30pm, trying to pray for our friend in the hospital and think it all through. But then I didn’t want to run back home, so I started toward where Stephen was at a friends’ house, teaching their teenage daughter for her photography class. I met him just as he was leaving and promptly burst into tears.

And my wise husband decided we should start by calling some friends and going to pray at the hospital.  Yim, who I just love more as we continue to work together, called another staff member, Pranee, & her husband to come to the hospital. Pranee’s husband is a local Burmese pastor, and they are an incredible couple working to share Christ in the migrant communities.

Just as we were leaving our house, Mo Bya came over to get an update. I shared what I knew and said we were going to pray. He and the friend with him said they’d go up to the hospital to visit him, and they’d be right behind us on their bicycles.

We gathered around the hospital bed to pray, obviously creating a scene: three white Americans, one Thai-Karen, one Thai-Shan, and one Chinese-Burman gathered around the bed. Midway through our prayers, eight people from the community arrived and gathered around. We prayed for healing, we prayed for the community; we prayed for God to be glorified.

While we are gone, we asked Pranee & her husband to be a contact for them–we gave them some of our community fund so that the community can contact them for help. We are really thankful for this, feeling like they have somewhere to go and to a couple that really, really loves the Lord.

The nurses asked about resuscitation and what we would do with the body if he died. They are skeptical, telling us the slight chances he has. We spent over an hour talking together.

And now, we are just praying. We are giving thanks for friends that will come along to help with translation and give prayer and love this community as much as we do. We are giving thanks for the community support–he has constantly had friends at his side. We are giving thanks that we have another opportunity to show our neighbors where our love and hope lies. We are giving thanks that it appears this is a less-contagious strand of meningitis.

And we are praying for big things, maybe even bigger than we were before. We are praying that he will be healed and without brain damage. We are praying that our neighbors, the doctors and nurses, other patients, and even our friends around us will see that God is big and He heals and He loves even the least of these.  We are praying that God will be glorified.

He is already using these circumstances to draw us to Him and to His work in us.  Now we are praying He will use these circumstances to bring others to know Him. I hope we are blessed with “just enough foolishness to believe we can make a difference in the world” (Franciscan benediction).  I hope we are persistent enough to bother & to beat down with our continual coming, but find that “God gives justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night” (Luke 18).

Please, continue to pray with us. Pray for miracles with us.