2-23-08 4:00 a.m.
I awoke in the middle of the night with the same prayer request that I went to bed with. “Lord, show me from your Word where I might pray with assurance that gives You the glory as I pray over our friend’s upcoming transplant.” While in that twilight state of half asleep and half awake, a vivid picture flashed before my eyes, The Garden of Eden. I was now fully awake. I ran to my bible, flipped the lights on, and began reading Genesis 2:21-22 - “So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping he took one of the man’s ribs and closed up the place with flesh. Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.”

I saw this for the first time as God’s inspiration over the principle of transplantation. It was his idea from the beginning - sharing life, taking something from a body in order for another one’s life to be blessed. In the Garden, it wasn’t the rib alone that gave life to Eve, it was God’s gift, His will, He breathed life and created her by using the rib of man, Adam. It is not my desire to stretch the truth or try to make it say something that it does not. But I do believe the Lord showed this picture to me to let me know that He creates life by His breath, and He guides life, and sometimes we are guided towards transplantation in order to receive the fullness of life.

Later that afternoon, at a special prayer service on behalf of our friend’s son who will be undergoing a kidney transplant in March, I felt the grace of God and the love of the Father beaming down on me as I considered this portion of Scripture being illuminated in a new way. God is with us, Emmanuel.