Letting go of fear is hard sometimes, but I'm learning that if I turn everything over to God and trust in His love, my fear lifts—and good things happen.
That was certainly true while our son, Richard, was growing up. He was born with a heart murmur. When he was released from the hospital, the doctors prescribed medicine for him to take for a few months and required that a pediatrician monitor his health. Though my wife and I wanted to treat the problem entirely through prayer, we complied with these requests because of British law. But we held onto the idea that God wrapped everyone (including the doctors) in love, not fear, and that Richard was safe. God would surely work everything out perfectly.
Over the next two years, whenever the pediatrician checked Richard with a cardiograph, the heart problem was always there. He said the murmur was probably caused by a hole in the heart and that the heart was enlarged (not a good thing). But he also said that a closer examination would be too intrusive—especially since he didn't think the problem would limit Richard's physical activities. This was certainly reassuring, and we hoped it would pave the way for us to treat the difficulty totally through prayer. It did. The pediatrician kindly agreed to suspend further examinations; he did say, however, that he thought prayer alone wouldn't heal defects in the heart wall.
