PRAY WITH YOUR EYES OPEN

Learning to live in the middle of answered prayer

The Mysterious Pain

I was sitting in a room with thousands of college students, singing to a God I had followed for the past seven years when I noticed a strange pain on the left side of my chest. It wasn’t sharp, but it was persistent enough for me to go to the doctor.

At the first doctor appointment, I heard what might be the most offensive thing I have ever been told by a medical professional. “We looked at your x-rays and EKG. Everything looks good. So we think we’ve figured out the problem. Your backpack is too heavy. Try not wearing it for a week and see if the pain goes away.”

I was offended, but I was also desperate for the pain to go away. So I stopped wearing my backpack for a few days. Much to my doctor’s surprise, the pain continued.

Fast forward a few weeks and that pain started to go down my arm.

Now I don’t know much about medicine, but I do know that’s a very bad thing. So my best friend took me to the emergency room. The doctors ran a bunch of tests and at 3 AM the doctor came into the room and said, “Everything looks good. We aren’t sure what the pain is, but we aren’t concerned. You’re good to go.”

I left the hospital so discouraged. Good to go?! I didn’t feel good at all. And the fact that multiple doctors had told me nothing was wrong started making me feel crazy.

Am I just making all of this up?!

The Diagnosis

The next morning, I woke up to a phone call from the hospital. I thought they might have been calling to ask for a survey on my experience in the emergency room.

Nope.

Here is how that phone call went:

“Hey, is this Nathan Farley?”

“Yes.”

“We’re calling you because we have a policy that the next doctor on shift reviews all the previous scans. It’s to make sure we never miss something. We wanted to inform you that when the next doctor came in, he noticed something strange on your tests. It seems you have two pulmonary nodules, one in each lung.”

“Okay… what does that mean?”

“It means you need to see some more doctors to determine what’s going on.”

Now I was already a bit of a hypochondriac before this conversation. But something happened this day that took me a year to undo. Anxiety flooded my body. Questions raced through my mind. Questions like…

Which doctors am I supposed to go to now? Could this be the beginning of a terrible illness? Would I be able to finish my undergraduate studies?

I’ll spare you the details, but after seeing a couple of doctors and doing more tests, here was the conclusion: I had pleurisy, which is inflammation in your lungs. When people who have pleurisy take a deep breath, their lungs hit their ribcage. This was the pain that I was feeling in my chest. And the pulmonary nodules could be nothing. After all, many people have pulmonary nodules in their lungs. But they couldn’t be certain until they scanned my lungs again three months later to see if they had grown.

You read that right. I was going to have to wait three months before I could be confident about my health. This is probably the worst thing you could tell a hypochondriac who is experiencing new depths of anxiety. I spent many nights wondering, Should I get a second opinion? Should I do more research on WebMD?

The answer to that last question is always no.

The Answered Prayer

Three months go by, the scans are done, and the doctor calls.

“Is this Nathan Farley?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Great. Isn’t it a beautiful day outside?”

“Umm… sure.”

“It really is a beautiful day outside. And you should go enjoy it because you no longer have pleurisy and the nodules in your lungs are gone.”

My first thought was, “Thank God!”

My second thought was, “They probably read the scan wrong again.”

I spent the next year obsessing over my health. I would watch for every strange symptom, always seeing a new doctor, waiting for just one of them to say, “You have been living with an undiagnosed illness for years. If we had caught this sooner, we may have been able to do something. But now it’s too late.”

That’s never what happened. Instead, every doctor would tell me the same thing. “This strange symptom is because you are so stressed out. You need to calm down.”

A Bible Story

One day I stumbled upon a story found in the book of Acts, chapter 13. Peter, one of the early church leaders had been arrested. Everyone expected him to be killed by the government officials. This led a group of Jesus’ followers to gather and pray for his release. This wasn’t a quick prayer session either — the story implies that these people were gathered for more than one day and offered continuous prayers for Peter.

God graciously said yes to their prayers.

God used an angel to release Peter from prison. Now before you check out and go, “I can’t stand these Bible stories. They’re just so unrealistic!” Let me just say, even Peter thought this was too crazy to be real. The story says…

“Peter followed him out of the prison, but he had no idea that what the angel was doing was really happening; he thought he was seeing a vision.”

Isn’t it funny how often we pray for something and when God says yes, we assume it’s just a coincidence? Peter is being released from prison, but he thinks to himself, “There’s no way this is actually happening. I must be dreaming!”

One of my least favorite quotes about prayer goes like this: “Prayer changes me more than anything else.” Now don’t misunderstand me. I firmly believe that prayer changes us. Anytime you spend with God is going to change who you are. But let’s not forget who we are talking to in prayer. He has the power to not only strengthen you in the fire, but to deliver you from it entirely.

Peter eventually realizes he isn’t dreaming. He goes straight to the house where everyone is praying for him. He knocks on the door and announces himself. The woman closest to the door was so excited that she forgot to open it, but instead ran into the prayer meeting shouting, “PETER IS OUTSIDE! HE’S KNOCKING ON THE DOOR! PETER IS OUTSIDE!

“You’re out of your mind!” they told her. But she kept insisting that it was true. (Acts 12:15)

Too often we pray with our eyes closed. We pray, asking God to move, and yet we never open our eyes with the expectation that God is going to answer our prayer. So we just keep our eyes closed — this means we are never disappointed by unanswered prayer. But it also means we are never surprised by answered prayer.

The Big Idea

Prayer is communicating with a God who stands ready and able to help us in our time of need. Sometimes that help is strength to endure the fiery trial. At other times, that help is deliverance from the fire altogether.

This story in Acts makes me laugh because I had such a similar experience. I spent three months praying for God to heal me and when he did, I wanted to tell the doctors: “You’re out of your mind! That’s not how medicine works. Look at my scans again! The nodules have to be there.”

Acts 12 taught me a valuable lesson. I needed faith not only to survive the fiery trial. I needed faith to believe I was no longer in it. That faith did not come over night. It took more than a year to start praying with my eyes open. It took a year for me to finally believe that God is so good and loves me so much that he decided to heal me of whatever ailed my body. Now I know this won’t always be the case. Death is something every single sinner and saint alike will go through. But this time, he did. And I needed to stop being so anxious about my health and start being grateful for it.

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Have you been praying with your eyes closed? Have you been asking God for something that he has already gracious given you? Are you struggling to believe that you are — right now — living in the middle of answered prayer?

I know what it’s like to be there. But maybe, just maybe, you could begin to believe that God is good and loves you enough to not only strengthen you in the fiery trial, but occasionally deliver you from it entirely.