My First Prayer Wasn't Faith. It Was Panic. God Heard It Anyway.
If your prayers feel thin and scared right now, I want to tell you about my first one. It wasn't beautiful, and it wasn't faith. God heard it anyway.
I had never prayed in my life. I was raised by atheists in Belgium. Not hostile to religion, just absent from it. Prayer was something other people did, people who "needed that kind of thing". In 1993 I was 36, healthy, independent, and I had no reason, as far as I could see, to go looking for God.
Then I got sick. Within 48 hours I went from healthy to paralyzed and on a ventilator. The diagnosis was Guillain-Barré syndrome, a condition where the body's own immune system attacks the nerves.
I want to be honest about what I felt lying in that ICU bed. It wasn't peace. It wasn't courage. It was terror, stripped clean of everything I had ever relied on. I couldn't move. I couldn't fix it. And when the monitors started showing trouble with my heart, I couldn't even pretend I was in control anymore.
The prayer
So I prayed. For the first time in my life, with no practice and no real confidence that anyone was listening.
It wasn't a prayer of faith. It was a deal. It went like this: "If you help me, I will talk about what you did for me, so others can ask you for help."
That was it. A desperate man bargaining with a God he wasn't sure existed.
And something happened. I can't explain it better than this: I suddenly knew, with a certainty I had no right to, that I was going to be okay.
I got better, faster than the doctors expected. Within two months of leaving the hospital, I was running five miles a day.
And then I did something I'm still not proud of. I'll come back to that.
Your prayer doesn't have to be good to be heard
I'm not telling this story to impress you with a miracle. I'm telling it because of the prayer: the first one, the bad one, the one that was mostly panic and no faith at all.
A lot of people facing a diagnosis or a surgery carry a quiet fear alongside the obvious one. Not just what if something goes wrong? but what if my prayer isn't good enough? What if I don't believe enough? What if God only listens to people whose faith is solid?
My 1993 story makes that fear very hard to defend. I had no faith. I had never prayed. I wasn't sure He existed. And God answered.
It was never about the quality of my prayer. It was about His willingness to hear it.
The Bible says the same thing. Jesus once told a story about two men praying. One was polished and religious. The other could barely lift his eyes, and all he managed was seven words: "God, have mercy on me, a sinner" (Luke 18:13, NIV). Jesus said that was the man who went home right with God.
And if you already belong to Him, there's a promise for the days you can't find words at all: "The Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans" (Romans 8:26, NIV). In plain words: when you can't find the words, God's own Spirit prays for you. Even your groans count.
If you're still sick
I need to be careful here, because some of you have prayed for weeks or months and you're still sick.
God hearing your prayer doesn't mean you'll get the answer you're asking for, on the timeline you're asking for. I know that from my own life. In 2020, after more than ten years of following Christ, I got cancer. God didn't take me around it. He took me through it.
So if the healing hasn't come yet, please don't conclude that your prayer was too weak to reach Him. Mine was weaker than yours. It reached Him. Yours does too.
The promise I forgot
Now for the part I'm not proud of.
I had made God a promise in that ICU bed: if He helped me, I would tell people what He did. He helped me. And I didn't tell anyone.
Instead, I gave the credit to myself. To willpower, to mental discipline, to the self-help ideas I was reading at the time. Years later I gave a talk at work about my recovery, and I edited God out of the story completely. It fell flat. I didn't understand why.
For fifteen years I built a career and kept the promise in a drawer. I wasn't hostile to God. I was just absent.
Then something happened that brought me back through a church door.
That's when I finally understood what 1993 had been. Not an unexplained recovery. A beginning I had walked away from, and a God who hadn't walked away from me.
How I came back is a story of its own. It's in the book.
The rest of the story
I eventually wrote the whole thing down: the paralysis, the bargain, the fifteen years of forgetting, and the cancer diagnosis in 2020. The second time, God met me very differently, and so did I. I faced the paralysis with terror. I faced the cancer with trust.
The book is called The Desperate Bargain, after that first prayer.
Maybe your prayers feel thin and scared right now. Maybe they don't sound the way you think a faithful person's prayers should. If so, I think my story belongs in your hands.
The first chapter is free. Leave your name and email below and I'll send it to you. You'll also hear from me once a week or so: short notes about faith in the places life actually takes you. You can unsubscribe anytime.
If someone you love is facing something hard right now, send them this page. And if you'd like me to pray for you by name, leave your contact info in the pop-up. I read every one.
