A Chicago Lawyer Sees Sam I 121

The next day John’s condition grew even worse, indicating an operation regardless of his weakness. I was allowed to see him just before he was wheeled off to the operating room. He was still conscious but couldn’t talk. I approached his bed along with the doctor and a nurse and, with a prayer in my heart, it seemed that I knew exactly what to say. “John, you remember what happened the last time we prayed together?” He nodded. “Just keep on praying, and everything will be all right, I know. Just keep on praying.”

I never saw him again alive. The doctor came five hours later to tell me that he had died on the table after a three-hour fight to save him.

After my prayer the night before, it had never occurred to me that he could die. I had interpreted God’s answer to mean that John would live here and now and I had been unconcerned about anything else. Desperately I drove to the church to see my “spiritual man.” He listened patiently, gravely, as I poured out my story. Then he suggested that perhaps what had happened might be a blessing—at least for John—and better for all of us. It was better that John had been taken than that he should have continued in this life as an incurable invalid, perhaps in a wheelchair, or with his mind affected and cooped up for years on end in one of the only convalescent homes available to us at the time.

Three days after the funeral I saw the doctor again. After prefacing his remarks with “I don’t know whether I should tell you this,” he said, “but the surgeon found the brain damage so severe that John would have been at least partially paralyzed, and perhaps incurably crippled mentally forever.”

“You see,” wrote Yager, “God had intervened. When my client and I had prayed, God was as good as His promise. When invited in He did intervene—even when Dorothy first came to me about a divorce. I believe that He will do the same for anyone who prays as my client did, depending naturally on the nature of his acknowledged needs.”