Bathed in Prayer
Psalm 116:1-2 – I love the Lord, because he hath heard my voice and my
supplication.
Because he hath inclined his ear unto me, therefore will I call upon him as long
as I live.
How do you live a life that was bathed in prayer even before you were born? I
had a praying grandmother who taught her daughter the power of prayer and
indirectly influenced my life from the very day I was born. The story told to me
by both my grandmother and my mother was that I was born at home, about six
weeks premature because of my mother’s poor health. She developed toxaemia and
was bedfast for a good many weeks before I was born and I only weighed 3 pounds
at birth.
The doctor told my Dad to “take the baby into another room tonight so that the
mother won’t know when she dies. She will never live until morning.” My
grandmother took over and God gave her the wisdom to make an improvised
incubator out of a shoebox and hot water bottles. That shoebox was my bed for a
good while after birth. After I outgrew the shoebox, my bed was a dresser drawer
in my parent’s room. There were no bassinets in those days – not for the poor
folk, anyway. God heard and answered their prayers and spared my life and for
all these 70-plus years, I have been both the instigator and the recipient of
answered prayers.
At the age of two, I contracted a viral infection of the immune system, called
erysipelas that threatened to take my life. My mother told me about it many
years later after I was married and had children of my own. She related how the
doctors told them to “take the baby home and just try to keep her as comfortable
as possible. We have done all that we can do.” With tears in her eyes, my Mom
said, “I had never made a bargain with God before, but I found a secret place of
prayer and told God that if He would let me keep my little girl, I would raise
her to serve Him. The day you married Waldo, I felt like I had kept my part of
the bargain.”
God kept his part of that bargain and the disease abated and I not only lived,
but also grew up to become a preacher’s wife and spent the next 50 plus years
serving God with my preacher husband. How I praise God for a praying Mother and
grandmother.
Audrey Mullen waldokeith@cox.net