Pray Anyway: The Miracle in the Dim Room

By Jessica Brodie

Have you ever experienced the genuine healing power of prayer?

I had a surreal, supernatural experience about 17 years ago with my daughter, Avery. Poor Avery was prone to ear infections, exacerbated by the fact that we lived in the mountains at the time, and I had to drive to and from her daycare across differing elevations that made the fluid in her ears fluctuate wildly. By the time she was one, she’d already had one set of ear tubes, and then another problem arose—a clogged tear duct in her eye.

The doctor said that if I massaged her eye and put hot compresses on it and let some time pass that it would probably resolve itself, but a few months passed and it was still clogged. He said the only solution was surgery, and I desperately wanted to avoid that. She’d already had anesthesia once, and I just didn’t think it was a good idea for her to go through that again. So I kept massaging and waiting, and finally the time came for us to get scheduled for surgery.

We had our initial consultation, and I went back home, feeling a deep unrest in my soul, a deep sense of foreboding and fear.

I changed her diaper and put a fresh set of clothing on her, and there in that dim room, way down in my heart, I got the strongest sense: Pray over her. Now, I was a praying mama, and I prayed for my kids daily, but this sense was different. I heard in my soul: Place your hands upon her and pray over her.

So I laid her down and placed my hand over her eye, my fingers tracing her tear duct, and I prayed with a fervent passion, a passion so strong I felt the Holy Spirit fully rise up within me. I don’t remember my exact words, but they were something along the lines of, “Lord, heal her. Unclog these ducts and heal her completely.”

The words didn’t really matter, I don’t think. What mattered was that raw sense of absolute trust and knowledge that the Lord of the universe, the creator of all existence, had the power to flow through my hands and heal the area where I was touching. I knew this deep in my bones, a soul knowledge that could never be erased.

We went about our afternoon—and soon I realized Avery was healed. She didn’t have to have that surgery at all. The next morning, she woke up and her eyes were clear of any of the yuck that had been troubling her. To this day, she’s 18 years old and has never had an issue with it since.

There is power in fervent prayer, prayer that believes, prayer that acknowledges God of all creation will do this if he chooses. I knew he could, and for whatever reason, he did it.

But he doesn’t always choose to answer our prayers the way we want him to. I’ve prayed just as fervently for other things that never came to fruition. I know people who lost their battles with cancer despite that prayer. It doesn’t mean it didn’t mean my prayers that long-ago afternoon were more powerful than theirs, or that I had more belief behind my prayer. It only meant that in this particular circumstance, God’s will was that Avery be healed of that issue—and maybe he needed me to understand how important it was to go to him with humble, complete trust and awe and perfect knowledge that he could.

God has a plan that is far beyond our understanding. But pray anyway. Pray with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul. James 5:16 reminds us, “The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.”

I don’t know what you’re praying for today, or how long you’ve been praying for it. Maybe you’ve been waiting years. Maybe you’ve already had your prayer answered and can’t stop marveling at it.

Either way, I hope Avery’s story reminds you of this: God sees you. He hears you. And he is always, always working—even when we can’t see it.

Keep praying. Keep trusting. The God who unclogged a baby’s tear duct in a dim room in the mountains is the same God who holds your situation in his hands right now.

And forevermore.

If you know someone who would benefit from reading this blog, please share this with them:

Big news!

I’m honored to announce both of my books are finalists in the prestigious Selah Awards, with winners to be announced in May! The Memory Garden is a finalist in the Contemporary Women’s Fiction category, while Tangled Roots is a finalist in both the General Fiction and the Audiobook categories. What an honor! I hope you’ll read them. Click here to learn more and buy the books.