Praying for God's Will

My nephew Josh's wife, Stephanie, gave birth on Monday to their first child, William Blake Burns. Will was taken five weeks early by cesarean and, as anticipated, has a number of birth defects including several heart abnormalities, a small cleft palette and a missing kidney. A team of doctors at Vanderbilt Hospital in Nashville (including a cardiologist, a urologist, a pediatric surgeon and a geneticist) assessed his condition. He will need at least three surgeries to repair his hypoplastic left heart syndrome, and the doctors at Vandy have recommended that the first of these surgeries be done at the University of Michigan Medical Center in Ann Arbor.

Will was airlifted to Ann Arbor this morning, and Josh and Steph are following close behind on a commercial flight today. Surgery is scheduled for Monday, after which Will will not be able to travel for 10 days to two weeks. Stephanie plans to stay in Ann Arbor until Will can return home to Nashville. Josh will stay as long as his job will allow --- probably a week.

I am praying for God's will to be done, but I am also praying pleas to affect God's will for Will. I am praying for God to demonstrate his wonderful healing power, for his guiding hand on the doctors attending Will, and for his divine Spirit (the Comforter) to provide Josh and Stephanie with peace and safety during their travels.

I have emailed a church in Ann Arbor and am praying that God will lift up someone who will take Josh, Stephanie and Will under his or her wing since their family cannot be there with them.

When I shared the news of William Blake's birth, a friend of mine at church shared this poem by the better-known Blake and I found it to be incredibly apropos and powerfully moving:

Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.
We are led to believe a lie
When we see not through the eye
Which was born in a night to perish in a night,
When the soul slept in beams of light.
God appears, and God is light
To those poor souls who dwell in night,
But does a human form display
To those who dwell in realms of day.


May God's light shine, and may God's will -- his good, pleasing and perfect will -- be done.