My son and daughters are all grown now, but as their mother I still worry about them. Especially when Gina, my youngest, told me about the car trouble that she’d been having.
“I turn the key in the ignition, but it just won’t start,” Gina said when I was down in Texas visiting her and her sister for a month.
It sounded to me like battery trouble, but Gina told me that she didn’t have enough money to get a new one right away.
Her sister had given her a charger to keep in the car. It fixed the problem in the short term, but Gina knew that she couldn’t rely on it forever.
She often worked late, and I hated to think of her stranded somewhere in the dark. I knew that the longer she put off seeing a mechanic, the greater chance there was that she could get stuck somewhere out on the road.
So I prayed: “God, please keep Gina’s car running until she can have it fixed. I really don’t want her to get stuck. Amen.”
The next time Gina got in her car to head to work, it started up without a problem. She didn’t even need the charger.
For the rest of my visit, her car ran perfectly. That prayer really did work!
I returned home to California, comforted that God was watching over my daughter.
Shortly afterward Gina sent me a text message. She had finally taken the car in to a mechanic. When he inspected the battery, he was completely baffled. He had all of the other mechanics at the garage gather around and take a look at it.
After a minute, one of them said, “Miss, we’re trying to figure out how you’ve been starting your car. Your battery is totally shot.”
“I was using a charger for a while,” Gina explained. “But then the car just started working on its own. It seemed like it was fixed.”
“Fixed?” said the mechanic, shaking his head. “No way. You’ve got no juice in this battery. Not even a little. Even with a charger, this thing shouldn’t have worked.”
Gina’s car didn’t have any battery power. It was running on prayer.
