Cindi's been able to sleep the past few nights, and is feeling much better now.  Thank you to all who prayed, and to the God who heard.  Heard, cared, and answered.

It would be easy to think that Cindi is healthy now because of some natural, unfailable cycle.  You get a nasty cold or the common flu for a few days or a week, and then you get better.  That's just how it works.

That would easy to think.  And it would also be presumptuous.  Oftentimes the thoughts that come most easily are the ones that are the most presumptuous.  Pride, self-sufficiency, earthly fears, thanklessness, assumed grace — easy to come by, hard to get rid of, and downright blasphemous.

No, Cindi is better because there is a powerful and present God who is as good as He is sovereign, and it was His pleasure to make her well.  It is not always His pleasure to make people well, and that's His prerogative.  I only pray that I might learn to accept and embrace and lean on that as life goes on.  But this time, it pleased Him to hear and to heal. That's why Cindi got better.  That's why anyone gets better.  That's why anyone gets saved.  If God weren't like this, it would've been foolish for me to ask you to pray for my wife.  It would be foolish for me to ask you to pray for (or Him to do) anything.

This is one reason why it is so inconceivably wonderful to be redeemed and regenerated: not because we get healed in this life, but because we have the new eyes to see and to know and to give thanks and to rejoice when we do.

I do not chalk this up to fate or chance or destiny or biology or the notion that Cindi and I are inherently good people and so we deserved it (we're not and we didn't).  I credit it to a sovereign God, a loving Savior, and a powerful Spirit.  And to your prayers, which He humbled Himself to hear.  Welcome to grace.

Jesus was going throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness among the people. The news about Him spread throughout all Syria; and they brought to Him all who were ill, those suffering with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, paralytics; and He healed them. – Matthew 5:23-24