I can still see the blue chair I used to sleep on. I’d sit there in the evenings and nights, watching her sleep. See her wake from sleep, not know that she was in the hospital, and ask me where she was. For almost a year, I could see how her life was thinning month by month.
Yes, my mother was dying of cancer, but no one believed it. My mother least of all.
She believed she would be healed, and friends and family would encourage her in that belief. Not merely stabilized. Not given a few more years.
Completely healed.
She talked about it the way you talk about a trip already booked: when this was over, she’d travel country to country, standing in churches full of people, telling them what God had done.
I didn’t know what to do with those conversations because, early on, the Lord had shown me she wouldn’t stay.
Then one evening she looked at me and asked: ‘Why don’t you pray for me?’
I had no answer I could give her.
Not because I doubted God’s power to heal. The reason was something else.
This is not really an article about my mother. It is about the question her sickness pressed into me, one I suspect most of us have never sat with long enough to feel its weight:
What is faith that God can heal worth, if it never asks His will?
When Faith Asks About God’s Will
We talk constantly about God’s power. About His will, almost never.
After all, Scripture is full of God’s power. He parts seas. Raises the dead. Opens barren wombs. Heals lepers. Casts out demons. Opens doors no one can shut. Nothing is impossible for Him.
The obvious reading seems simple enough.
If God can do a thing, then faith means believing He will.
If He has power, we should expect the miracle.
If He is able, we should ask boldly.
There is truth in that. Real truth.
Yet when we reach for a miracle, how often do we stop and ask ourselves what God’s will is in this? When Jesus prayed:
“Father, if it is Your will, take this cup away from Me; nevertheless not My will, but Yours, be done.” — Luke 22:42 NKJV.
We usually read or hear about it as a portrait of a man worn thin, who begs for the cup to pass, hears nothing back, and makes peace with the silence.
But if you stay in the passage for a moment. You’ll notice what Jesus does not — doubt. He never questions the power. The power is settled. It is not even the subject of the prayer.
The subject of the prayer is God’s willingness.
The Faith Everyone Praised
Now, the obvious reading of faith, the one I grew up around, the one that filled my mother’s hospital room, goes like this: faith means believing God can. Believe and do not doubt. Claim the healing. Speak it. Refuse the bad report.
And let me be fair to it, because there is real truth here. Scripture does rebuke the man who wavers. Jesus does say, again and again, “Your faith has made you well.” God does honor bold asking; He invites it.
The people who came to me with promises, “We’re praying, God will heal her”, were not villains. They were reaching for the kindest words they had.
But notice what that version of faith quietly leaves out.
It never once asks about His will.
The Faith That Survives Gethsemane
Faith cut loose from His will often becomes vain hope. And vain hope eventually breaks someone’s heart.
When we attach our faith to outcomes God never promised, we turn His power into a blank check, and our desires fill in the amount. The healing. The restoration. The open door. We call it faith, but underneath, it is something closer to instruction: Lord, here is what You will do.
And when the check is not honored? When the healing does not come, the door stays shut, the grave is filled anyway?
Three terrible conclusions tend to follow, and I have watched people pick each one. God is weak. Or God is unloving. Or cruelest of all: my faith failed.
The devastation is real. I have sat in it.
Jesus shows us another shape of faith entirely. The cup was not taken from Him. The outcome He asked about did not come. And His faith did not break, because it was never resting on the outcome. It rested on the will of His Father. That is the difference between a faith that survives Gethsemane and a faith that dies there.
Learning to Want to Embrace His Will
So how does anyone come to pray God’s will and mean it? Paul gives the order of operations:
“And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.” — Romans 12:2 NKJV
Transformation first. Discernment follows.
We cannot discern the will of God while our minds are still shaped by a world that treats God as a means to our ends — a power source, a vending machine, a last resort.
The renewed mind does not just learn what God wills. It slowly, sometimes painfully, begins to desire it — because it has come to trust the God who said:
“For I know the thoughts that I think toward you… thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.” — Jeremiah 29:11 NKJV
That desire is the soil healthy faith grows in. Nothing else holds when the cup is not removed.
A Wish or a Promise
And here is the comfort I did not expect to find: His will is better than our self-invented hopes.
The will of God toward His children is not a smaller, sadder version of our dreams. My mother hoped for the years to travel and tell what God had done. The will of God holds a resurrection where she will never stop telling it.
Surrendering our hopes to His will is not settling for less. It is trading a wish for a promise. Trusting Him when He chooses something else.
And if His will truly is better than our brightest hopes, what if we spent less time persuading Him to want what we want, and more asking Him to teach us to want what He wills?
