Wrestling with Unanswered Prayers... with Matt from The Afters

“I think going through something hard like this really does change for you what HOPE looks like.”

Matt from the Afters vulnerably shares his journey to trust God even in the midst of the storm. If you’re looking for hope in the middle of unanswered prayers, this video is for you.

View this video with The Afters and other Healing Out Loud videos with JOY FM artists videos on the JOY FM YouTube Channel.

Transcript:

It’s really hard to navigate some of that because as a husband and a father, we’re just wired to fix things and there’s no solution. There’s nothing I can do and there’s not… Yeah.

For about a year and a half, my wife had had breathing issues that she has asthma as well. I think her pulmonologist kept thinking, well, this is asthma. But my wife knew that there was something different and this didn’t feel like asthma. They did all kinds of tests and they couldn’t figure anything out. They just kept trying one drug after another to try to figure out how do we treat this?

Then finally, he tried this one drug and it made her worse even. So he told us later, he said to himself, “I’m at a loss. Everybody responds to this drug.” So he said that he went back and looked at all of her old scans and x-rays and all these things, and he found a tumor in her left lung.

But during that time, she developed a chronic lung disease. It’s so rare you can’t hardly find anything out about it. We’re not exactly sure how to proceed because there’s no drugs for it, there’s no treatment. If it progresses, it’ll require a lung transplant, that type of thing.

Yeah. Navigating it’s hard when you don’t have any answers and you don’t have a path forward.
Give me a minute.

You try to keep a positive attitude and stay hopeful. Then I think when her pain gets worse, it’s harder for her to keep that hope. I think also, without a light at the end of the tunnel, it’s also hard for her because I think initially we thought, well, the surgery will be the end date. After we get out of surgery, then we’re in the clear. But then that just opened up new hardships, new struggle, new pain, new grief. I think where we are now, I think I know that there’s not a good answer for why this happens to my wife and why the chronic pain and why this disease that doesn’t have a cure. But I do feel that God has kind of just walked with us through it in a weird way. Not the way that gets tied up with a bow at the end, but just like a Job kind of way. But not at the end of Job’s story. Maybe that will be the end of our story, but right now, we’re just in the place where there’s no good answer and there’s no light at the end of the tunnel.

God’s plans for Job were to meet him at the bottom, and why he does that, I don’t really know. He could have met with… Job was a godly man, so he could have met with him at any time. But when he actually shows up and speaks to him, it’s when he’s at the bottom. So maybe this just is the nature of God and maybe this is how he works. I’m sure there’s a reason. I don’t know why he does what he does.

I don’t know that I ever felt angry. I think for me, I always felt… I don’t know what the right word is for it, but just asking why. Why her and why this? It’s not necessarily helpful I think in the moment to say that God’s got a plan for all of this, even though that’s probably true. I think the thing that I have most appreciated people telling me is, “We’re praying for you.” But actually pray.

I think going through something hard like this, I think it really does change what hope looks like. I think for me, I just want… Hope, I think is knowing that God is with me.I think it’s easy to think, well hope would be finding solutions to the temporary pain that we are going through now. If you let go of that and then just think, well, maybe this pain is forever, as long as we’re on this earth. Then thinking about finding hope in that pain is just the presence of God being with us and…

He has been with us. So we’ll move forward and we’ll take it one day at a time. Maybe the pain will come to an end, but God will be with us the whole time.

Hear Matt from The Afters’ story featured in their song, “God Is With Us”