In an earlier post, I mentioned that I started praying for a friend with back pain. Well, I got an email update a couple days ago that revealed an interesting trend. It seems as though the pain emerges and retreats depending upon my prayers.
Every instance in which I paused and prayed out loud for the pain to depart in Jesus' name, my friend reported that the pain instantly left. Unfortunately, the pain would come back (for apparently no reason) when my prayers were distracted and/or lacked force. The correlation is very evident to me, and it would be hard for me to accept at this point that the correlation is merely due to a series of coincidences. Thus, given the data, I am convinced that my prayers actually have an immediate and obvious effect on my friend's well-being.
This is both exciting and scary for me. I am excited to see the power of God at work through me. However, I now feel a new sense of responsibility that I didn't feel when I was in ignorance of the importance of my prayers.
I have learned an important lesson so far in my experiences in prayer for this friend: prayers are close to ineffective if they are not prayed with my whole heart! Perhaps this is what Jesus means by the phrase "double-minded"--if we have too many thoughts in our head at once, how can we really put our heart into any one of those thoughts? I am now convinced that I need to be intentionally single-minded so that the Father will take my prayers seriously.
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