Daily Devotion

July 25, 2012

PRAYER (6)


“You will ask what you desire, and it shall be done.” Jn 15:7 NKJV

In May 1996, ValuJet flight 592 crashed into the Florida Everglades, killing 110 passengers. Navy experts tried using special technology to detect the plane’s black box, without success. Holding a rope that kept them spaced three feet apart, searchers poked through every square foot of muck. After fourteen days they had found nothing. The physical conditions were unbearable. The sun beat down upon them and temperatures hovered in the nineties. Diesel fuel and caustic hydraulic fluid floated in the water, forcing searchers to wear several layers of protective rubber. Fourteen days of that had left them exhausted, but they had to find the black box. Sergeant Felix Jimenez of Metro-Dade Police was one of the searchers. For fourteen days he’d prayed for the bereaved families and the safety of his fellow workers. But on the fifteenth day as he took a break, suddenly he realized he’d failed to pray for one important thing: that God would help them find the black box. So he asked God for direction, resumed the search, and when he stuck his pole into the water he hit something metallic. He pulled the object out of the muck. It was the black box. Jimenez writes in Guideposts: “I thought of the many days we had spent searching for the recorder, how we must have tramped over it many times, and I wondered why its retrieval had taken so long. Amid the low rustle of sawgrass and the call of the wild heron, I seemed to hear the response: ‘Why did it take you so long to ask?’”

Share