Prayer story #2

First I'll share with you some personal lessons/revelations on prayer. I've already told you one, this is the next one that comes to mind when I think about prayer;

I was abruptly woken up one night by John writhing in pain. He was having another one of his kidney stones, but this one was really bad and we knew he had to go to the hospital. We threw some clothes on and called someone to look after the girls, and ran off to the hospital at 3am. John was admitted into the emergency area. They proceeded to pump him up with drugs that weren't working. He lay in bed in horrible pain, and I sat in a chair besides his bed waiting for yet another stone to pass. On the other side of the curtain where I was sitting was an older couple (older than us, but probably early 50's). Only divided by a curtain I could hear everything that was going on. It would appear that something was very wrong with his heart. He was in a lot of pain, and his wife was trying to get the Dr's to give her some answers. It seemed that they weren't sure what was going on, but it wasn't good whatever it was. During this time probably after two hours John's face changed and I could tell the stone had passed. He was really drowsy from all the drugs, but was no longer in pain. We sat there another hour or so and the people next to us were there the whole time. Me and John were both praying for them without knowing the other was praying silently. The man was in so much pain and he started to loose feeling in his left side. The wife was crying and talking to any nurse who walked by. They took him off for some test and brought him back. Still no answers. While I was praying for this man's pain to go away I realized that if his pain went away they would send him home, and he would probably drop dead within the day. Often we pray for symptoms to go away. When the truth is that if we didn't have the symptoms we would never know something was wrong and wouldn't have the chance to fix it. This applies to all parts of our being... physical, mental, spiritual... We can pray for comfort and strength, and wisdom for Dr's, but I realized that God wasn't going to take this pain away. The pain had a real purpose... which was to save this man's life... His body was trying to tell him something. I will never know what happened to that man. We did wind up talking to him and his wife and they were also Christians. We told them that we had been praying for them, and they were comforted. We were released after 5 hours. I continued to pray for that man for the next couple of weeks... I will never know what happened to him.