The Power of Prayer

Two momentous things happened today that need to be recorded:

1. For the first time, I pulled one of Josiah's teeth. A piece of dental floss with a slip knot in it, a very wiggly tooth (loose enough to slip the dental floss under one edge of it), a quick yank, and it was out! Fun! :)

2. Shav nursed.

He nursed! Hallelujah! He really nursed!!!

The past 12 days of no nursing have felt very long indeed. Each day, I've tried at least once to nurse him; but until this evening, Shav always arched his back, turned away, and tried to do everything he could to resist me. As they say, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.

I've felt more peaceful about the situation ever since I blogged about it - once again, blog therapy helped me change my attitude about a difficulty. I know my growing peace was also due to the fact that, ever since Sunday afternoon when I was gone at a concert with Josiah & David and Jeff was able to get Shav to take a bottle, we've had fairly consistent success with bottle-feeding. I had accustomed myself to the idea of pumping and bottle-feeding for the next 4 months or so.

But tonight, right before I tucked Shav in bed for the night, I decided to sit with him in my dear old glider rocker and see if, by chance, he would nurse. And he did. Oh, glory!

I smiled. I laughed. I cried (from joy). I winced (as his 6 teeth bit down a time or two). I savored the moment. And most of all, I prayed prayers of thanksgiving as gratitude welled up in my heart and burst forth. What a marvelous gift from God to answer prayer in this way and restore Shav to his normal-acting self!

Then, to tell the truth, thoughts crept into my head like, "Did Shav start nursing again because we prayed, or would he have done that anyway?" Immediately, a passage from Philip Yancey's book Prayer popped into my head - a passage that I often recall when I contemplate the mysteries of prayer. In it, he quotes from C.S. Lewis. Yancey writes,

In the normal course of providence, God works through and in creation, not despite it. For this reason, most answers to prayer are difficult to prove with any certainty. In C. S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters, a senior devil gives this advice on prayer to a young recruit:

Worry him with the haunting suspicion that the practice is absurd and can have no objective result. Don't forget to use the "Heads I win, tails you lose" argument. If the thing he prays for doesn't happen, then that is one more proof that petitionary prayers don't work; if it does happen, he will, of course, be able to see some of the physical causes which led up to it, and "therefore it would have happened anyway," and thus granted prayer becomes just as good a proof as a denied one that prayers are ineffective.

A little later Yancey says this:

"When I pray, coincidences happen," said Archbishop William Temple, "when I don't, they don't." Rather than dissecting such incidents, I try to use them as building blocks of faith, to see them as "God-incidents" instead of coincidences.

Tonight I'm so very thankful for the God-incident I witnessed this evening as I held Shav in my arms and watched him nurse. To God be the glory for this restoration and healing!!