We recently did a motor-home trip around the North Island of New Zealand, and on the way home attended a Rally for Christian Motor-homers, called the Good News Vanners. The last night there, we had a young missionary doctor come to speak to us, who told us about a lot of the miracles he had seen in healing in the land of Sudan in Africa. One poor child was born with two back to front feet, and had learned to walk like that….hard to imagine. The parents were desperate for help for their child, but refused to go to the missionaries for either medical or spiritual help.
By the time the witch doctors had finished with him, the parents could see there was no help there, and finally went to the missionaries in desperation. The missionaries told the parents that God could heal him if they would only believe that He could. The parents agreed, and the missionary medical people prayed earnestly for him. Lo and behold after a while, one foot began to turn around to normal. So they then decided to operate on the other one to fix it, and the boy now has two good feet that he can run and play on. They felt that doing it this way showed the people that God uses many different ways to answer prayer….the first one was a straight out miracle, and the second one was an equal miracle but answered by the surgeon’s expertise.
It reminded me of a story I used to tell at Bible-in-schools classes, where there was small girl who had brown eyes, but she didn’t like them. She asked her mother if God really could answer prayer and when her mother said, “Of course”, then said she was going to pray for blue eyes. The next morning she couldn’t wait to run to the mirror to see these beautiful blue eyes that God was giving her. Alas, she was so disappointed to see her own brown eyes looking back at her. Her prayers weren’t answered the way she wanted them to be! Her mother was a wise woman, and she said, “Look dear, God HAS answered your prayer. The only difference is that He has answered it with a no, and not with a yes”,
When the little girl grew up, she became a missionary in India and felt so sorry for all the poor ladies there, that she set out to help them. She dressed like they did, and with her dark hair and big brown eyes, she almost looked like an Indian herself. She was able to make friends with them easily as they felt comfortable with her, and told them about the love of Jesus, as well as show it to them practically by all she did to help them. It was only then (all those years later), that she realized that if God had given her the blue eyes that she so badly wanted when she was little, she couldn’t have made friends with these people like she had, and helped them as she did.
The point of this story is that God knows what is best for us when we pray for something we badly want, and answers us accordingly. There were many other stories that the missionary told us that last night about his work as a doctor over in that country, and we were glad that we had been there to hear them. God had performed many miracles, some supernaturally, and some through medical help, but all miracles for those concerned.