Watching my child suffer while dying is not something I can even describe.
The trauma of having an unmarked white van pull into the driveway of our home wrecked this mama’s heart and psyche. Seeing my children weep over their sister’s body is not something I can unsee. Watching my husband carry her spent body down the stairs her feet had struggled to climb is forever embedded in my memory.
Taylor had fought for each day of her entire life and died the same way, giving it her all. She gasped for breath for four days, and I could barely catch my own through the pain of watching her suffer.
That first night after the unmarked van left our home with Taylor’s ragged body inside, my strong, passionate husband began to weep, and between sobs, I made out his words: “I feel like I’m supposed to go get her.”
The overwhelming instinct both of us had to run to the funeral home and scoop her up felt ridiculously impossible to cope with. Everything in him said, “Protect your baby girl!” Though his eyes had seen her empty body, his father’s heart now saw an empty bed and didn’t know what to do. We could only hold each other and weep ourselves into a restless half-sleep that first night.
When Taylor was diagnosed at age four with Sanfilippo syndrome—a rare genetic neurologically degenerative disease—I prayed, “God, heal her. You can do anything. She needs your healing hand. Help us find a cure.”
But after 22 years of watching neurological degeneration slowly erase every memory and skill my daughter would ever have, my desperate prayers evolved. I needed to feel God’s love wrapped around me in my crumpled state. I could barely repeat the prayer I had learned years earlier: “God, hold me.”
This is what desperate prayer looks like. Not eloquent speeches or perfect theology, but the raw, honest cries of a heart that has nothing left.
I’ve discovered that when we can’t see a solution is on its way, our minds spin with confusion. Desperation ushers in pain, and grief soon follows. We plead with God, “Where’s my miracle?”
The men and women who cried out to God in deep despair in the Bible echoed the cries of my own heart. Amid their words and groans of anguish, I realized that frenzied desperation could be transformed into dependent faith.
In my most desperate moments, I learned three powerful truths about prayer:
God sees you when you cannot see Him. We sometimes feel abandoned and alone. But God showed me He was the God who sees me (El Roi). He knows your need even before you call out to Him.
There’s a small partial wall between the gathering room and kitchen in my home. When I’m standing by the kitchen sink, I can see throughout the main floor of the house. My husband hung a word vinyl on that little wall: “The angel of the Lord found you in the wilderness.” A reminder that God never allows our wilderness to go unnoticed.
God holds you when you cannot hold yourself. I felt God wrap His arms around me when Taylor took her last breath, and peace overwhelmed my spirit. My prayer for Taylor’s healing had been answered—just not in the way I expected. God was holding her, and God was holding me at the same time, in two different places.
God remembers you when you feel forgotten. I discovered that my “God, remember me” prayers were not because God had forgotten me, but because I needed to remember He was there all along, working things for my good and His glory even when I couldn’t see it.
Maybe you’re in your own desperate season right now.
Perhaps you’re pleading with God for an answer to prayer that seems to never come.
God sees you in the wilderness. His arms are wide enough to hold you in your pain. Pain cannot grip you tighter than God’s grace.
This is what I know: Desperate prayer is a wise admission, not a weak acceptance. It’s the strongest weapon in your spiritual arsenal.
No prayer is beyond God’s reach or reply.
There is no prayer too desperate to be heard by Him.
by Sarah Porter 
by Kelley Spencer 
