The fact that the Psalms never clearly report a change in external circumstances is one mark of the Bible’s persistent realism. Prayer is not always answered in the terms we expect and long for; the answer may be given in a way that is not even perceptible to someone looking at the situation from the outside. God answered intense prayers for my friend Marty’s healing as she was dying from a brain tumour. During the fifteen months following the operation that confirmed her diagnosis, she was steadily and at last fully healed from a lifelong sickness of sadness. It was a time of growing joy and freedom, a period punctuated by laughter as well as tears, as Marty gradually shed the crippling anxiety she had known for a lifetime. She died on Holy Saturday, and she died confident that she had been delivered.
(Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God)
