My daughter lay in a hospital bed, fighting for her life. Just days earlier, while serving with a team of missionaries in Malaysia, I prayed for a profoundly deaf child and God instantly and miraculously restored his hearing. “Why God, would you send me half-way around the world to pray for a child I don’t even know, heal him, and then bring me home to find my own precious daughter so gravely ill?” My heart ached with a pain so deep I thought it may take my own life as well. Heaven was silent. Pastors and friends had no answers.
I prayed as I desperately turned to God’s Word. I knew that I needed to hear from Him and Him alone. Opening to the Gospel of Luke, I read the words spoken by the angel Gabriel to Mary concerning the birth of Jesus, “For nothing will be impossible with God” (Luke 1:37). I had always thought this meant that there was nothing that God couldn’t do…and it does mean that; but in this moment God whispered, “Consider this…what is impossible for Me, is to do nothing!” Deep within my heart God confirmed that when I call to Him, He knows, He listens and He responds (cf. Psm. 34:4 & Psm. 65). No matter what our present circumstance looked like, God assured me that He was busily at work on my daughter’s behalf—that what would be impossible with God would be for Him to do “nothing.”
It has been said that we honor God most by believing His Word. The Word of God assures us that God hears our prayers and it is impossible for our loving, faithful God to do nothing in response.
Maureen Broderson
Maureen is an ordained minister in the Foursquare Church and a Certified John Maxwell Team Coach, Speaker and Trainer. Along with her husband Lance, she serves as a member of the Servant’s Council at The Church on the Way, where they also provide pastoral leadership for the Grief Recovery Ministries.
