Praying to God, wondering if you're the answer to your prayers... or something like that.

A week last Friday a Kenya friend who I've mentioned before - A - who lost his daughter in a bus crash in August went for chemotherapy. A lymphoma that had been operated on but was trying to grow back. Somehow, Kenyatta Hospital in Nairobi agreed to pay for his drugs and couriered them, wrapped in ice to a small care facility near the Ugandan border where A would be looked after. The first round was done on the Friday night. On the Sunday came a text from his phone asking any recipients to put the carers in touch with A's relatives as he was in a coma, and breathing only very shallowly. Emergencies are normally managed through family structures, and people normally give what they can. A's family did not come to help. Maybe because of strained relationships, and the cost that his AIDS treatment may have been to them in the past. As a church home group that A used to attend, it was a tough decision to know whether to get involved. Not least because with our friend being in a coma, he was not the one requesting money from us. When someone has AIDS, you know that medically speaking it will eventually take it's toll and maybe this is that moment. My thoughts even stretched to the need for the costs of a burial needing to be covered if that was to happen. A had believed that God was granting him  few more years, and on hearing that he was not on IVs, it seemed that the fight between life and death was not balanced. Hearing that news late on Monday I prayed that my mind would be swung the way God wanted it to.

One of the first verses I read in my Bible happened to be Luke 11:42 where Jesus is talking to the Pharisees about their hypocrisy.

Woe to you Pharisees, because you give God a tenth of your mint, rue and all other kinds of garden herbs, but you neglect justice and the love of God. You should have practiced the latter without leaving the former undone.

To me in this context, this verse said to not help would have been to neglect justice for A in the level of care he received and neglect God's love for him. Thankfully, God turned the hearts of several others of us in supporting, and so it was that we paid about £75 for an ambulance to come from Nyanza General Hospital and collect him, and hoped that the hospital bills would not come our way (they don't release you if you don't pay, rather the bill continues to increase indefinitely). That was last Wednesday last week. From then we heard nothing.

Yesterday morning, a week later, who do I get a call from, but A. He's in Eldoret - 120km from where his treatment was begun! We didn't pay for an ambulance to get his that far. He doesn't know how he got there, and he's been discharged for free but doesn't have his wallet or phone there (maybe they've been stolen, or maybe the care home has kept them safely). He remembers nothing of the chemo, no pain, no discomfort. What a miraculous turn of events. On the night before I had candidly told the home group that he could well have passed away, and we had asked a local pastor in Kisumu to search for A at Nyanza General Hospital (of which there are two). Amazing. It felt like he was back from the dead. I wonder if Lazarus would have been as confused when walking out of his grave in the Bible.

Today I'm reminded of the great testimony to God's goodness that he provides, but of the great trials that still run through life, as I hear of a family I know back in Wales whose youngest daughter was yesterday diagnosed with a brain tumour. I don't have anything special to say, other than that I'm planning to remember them every day in prayer, and I know that God has it in his hands and he knows best.