Prompted by the Holy Spirit

By Diane Pearson
Guest Writer

“Lord, please take care of Jenny! Tell her I love her!”

It was the second week of May when Linda first felt a burden to pray for her 32-year-old daughter Jenny who had given birth to her second baby boy on May 2. There were no complications from the birth, but Linda said, “The feeling that I needed to pray for her was so intense that I wept.”

“I wasn’t myself at all that week,” Linda continued. “I had absolutely no energy. I prayed and cried before going to work and when I went home at noon. It was always the same prayer: ‘Lord, take care of Jenny.’”

On the morning of May 15, Jenny was in bed asleep. Her husband Randy had overslept by 15 minutes. Normally he was showered and out the door by that time of the morning. As he was getting ready to leave, he heard Jenny make a noise. He walked over to her and discovered she was blue and just barely breathing. He rolled her over as she took her last two breaths before she stopped breathing. He called 911 and started CPR. The police and EMTs were there in one minute and 43 seconds. They had to shock her heart to start it beating again. After they got her in the ambulance, Randy called Linda.

“You need to get to the hospital right away. Something is wrong with Jenny. Her heart stopped beating. They said they may not be able to save her.”

Linda said, “When you receive word that your daughter may be dying, the first thing you want to do is jump in the car and get to the hospital as fast as possible. But I had a special burden to get down on my knees and pray before doing anything else.”

Linda said to her husband and youngest daughter, “We can’t leave yet. We have to pray first.”

The three of them kneeled by the side of the bed while Linda prayed: “God, please be with Jenny. Don’t take her from these two little boys. Send angels to be with her. Work through the doctors’ hands. Please be with her, Lord!”

At the hospital, a cardiologist told them that Jenny was literally drowning in her own fluids. He said, “She’s very, very critical. Her organs may shut down. We don’t know how much oxygen she lost, so she could have brain damage. She’s on total life support right now. The only thing I can say is to pray and pray hard.”

“When they let us into the ICU,” said Linda, “I fell to my knees beside her bed and pleaded for her life: “Lord, she has two little boys who need her. Please don’t take her away from these little boys.”

At the end of that prayer Linda said, “A calm came over me. I knew she was going to be OK. It was in God’s hands.”

They continued praying for Jenny all day long. Her name was added to prayer chains from Indiana to Florida.

That evening the cardiologist came to them again. “I have never seen anything like this. It’s absolutely a miracle,” he said. “She has made a turn for the better—such a quick turnaround from so critical a state. It’s just a miracle.”

Jenny was diagnosed with post-partum cardiomyopathy—a rare, life-threatening condition that can occur after childbirth. She went home after two weeks with no brain or organ damage—truly a miraculous recovery.

“There were many miracles along the way,” Linda said. “Randy overslept that morning, something he never does. He had just completed a refresher course in CPR, and the ambulance arrived in less than two minutes. But the biggest miracle was that the Holy Spirit gave me a burden to pray for Jenny for an entire week before this happened.”

This confirms Paul’s teaching about the work of the Holy Spirit in Romans 8:

The Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will. Romans 8:26-27 NIV

Thank you, Lord, for the gift of the Holy Spirit living inside all believers. He prompts us to pray, sometimes when we don’t understand why.