“Then he touched their eyes and said, “According to your faith will it be done to you”; and their sight was restored.”
Matthew 9:29-30

Today I had the opportunity to pray with friends for a lady whose walk in Jesus I deeply admire. She is in a pressure cooker time of immense difficulties in her life. So many things are coming at her at once that it is hard to imagine how she manages to make it through each day without physical or emotional collapse.

This woman demonstrates great strength, but even the strong come to the end of themselves and need to be lifted up.  We prayed peace into her life and the ability to rest on and in the Lord, the Rock of her life. Her circumstances are not going to change anytime soon, but we all know from our own struggles that the God of her circumstances can carry her and provide the strength to make it through.

Each of us who prayed today have been through or are currently in the fire. Somehow living through these things while sitting in the lap of the Lord has opened our eyes to eternity and eternal truths. We feel pain and grief and the uncertainty of lives that at times seem to have gone terribly wrong. But at the same time we look beyond the current grief and can see what lies ahead. We lean into the beauty and truth that what is being wrought today in struggle and pain brings with it an eternal weight of glory.

I never would have conceived that the faith-shaking event of losing Becky would so profoundly deepen my faith. It is as if I’ve been given the gift of preternatural sight. I can ‘see’ the end of what we endure today and I know that it is worth whatever pain and struggle we face. This is what I pray over those I love. I pray the truth and I pray the future and I pray the faith to make it home.

“In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith — of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire — may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.” 1 Peter 1:6-8