Answered prayers

I got a front row seat
To the longest wait
And I just can't see
Past the things I pray
Today

But when I fix my eyes 
On all that You are
Then every doubt I feel
Deep in my heart
Grows strangely dim

Francesca Battistelli, "Strangely Dim"


Many, many days I cried, pleaded, and begged the Lord to potty-train my boy. After all the failed attempts, the worthless books, and the time Henry was so distraught he made himself sick, it was obvious potty-training was beyond my means and control. My prayers were usually something like this:

God, please. Oh, God, please. Don't let him go to kindergarten in diapers. Don't let this be his entrance into his new school. Don't let this make him the weird kid. Not this. God, you know his friends were talking about it at the end of preschool, and you know I've done all I can. I can't make the switch turn on. God, please.

Other days, though, my prayers were more like hot, raging tears accompanied by gasps and screams and shoes being thrown at the closet wall. When the world was simply too much, and the glimpse of a diaper was enough to send me over the edge, I indeed felt I had a front-row seat to the longest wait. But those were the moments I most needed to fix my eyes on Jesus, most needed to remember all the blessings and answered prayers of the past.

It takes a certain amount of living before you have that gift, before you can count the past blessings and know the future will really be ok. I suppose, in that sense, I'm thankful one of the hardest trials of my adult life happened now. I'm thankful I had the tiny glimmer of hope that one day my son's bottom wouldn't be covered in Pampers.

But, the truth is, I doubted a lot. I wondered if perhaps this would be the one thing he never outgrew. It wasn't logical, but that's what fear does. That's what Satan does. No matter that he had mastered so much in speech and occupational therapies. No matter that he had a thirst for learning and all the skills that, surely, would one day equate to potty success. I still had my doubts. I still feared that my incredibly bright boy would be wearing Depends in his thirties.

And God answered our prayers anyway. Despite my doubts, fears, and failures, He potty-trained that boy anyway.

Do we have accidents? Yep. It's not the complete potty-training I've seen in his friends and cousins. But he wears underwear. He goes to the potty, sometimes without me asking him to go. He will wear underwear on his first day of school. 

Do you get the power of that? The hugeness of that? God… He performed a miracle. We didn't do this. We simply said, "Let's give it another shot." This time, it was the right time. His time. Thanks be to God for this indescribably good gift.