It Doesn’t Hurt to Ask

“Please, can you take me to America? How much would it cost? I just want to be able to walk like before.” The young man pleaded with my husband, Stephen, during his surgical consult. The man had developed a serious infection in both hip bones, causing the joints to fuse together, and now he could no longer walk normally. He was desperate. After learning there was nothing we could do locally, he reached for the stars and asked the seemingly impossible: Get me to America; help me find healing. It was a big ask. 
Unfortunately, this type of infection is difficult to treat even in the United States, and this man’s infection was extremely advanced. It felt hopeless and heartbreaking. How we longed for the Great Physician Himself to be there to grant this young man’s request. 
I recently reread the story of blind Bartimaeus—another desperate situation, in which faith cried out for mercy and sight was restored. My mind immediately went to our hip patient. How my heart ached for him as he asked to go to America. His plea seemed so unattainable, akin to a blind man asking a stranger to restore his sight. 
When we first moved to this culture, the requests never ceased to surprise me. One day a boy knocked on my door and asked for a watch. I innocently assumed he wanted to know the time, so I handed him mine. He said, “Thank you!” and started to walk away. I ran after him and tried to explain that I actually needed that watch and didn’t have any extras to give him at the time. 

When we first moved to this culture, the requests never ceased to surprise me.

The longer I live here, however, the more I start to admire the requests. I can’t always fulfill them, but I respect the gumption to ask big things. It doesn’t hurt to ask, right? 
What causes some people to make such bold requests? Think of all the people thronging about Bartimaeus. They weren’t crying to Jesus for help. They didn’t feel their great need. The blind man longed to see. Our fused-hip patient longed to walk.
What our hip patient and Bartimaeus have in common is that they both felt their desperate need, or as Ellen White calls it, “the eagerness of intense desire.”[1] They couldn’t heal themselves, and they realized the necessity of appealing to someone more powerful. They pressed for help.
Are we making big requests of God? Do we feel our desperate need for help that only He can give? He is ready and waiting to do more for us than we can even imagine. 
“All who feel their need of Christ as did blind Bartimaeus, and who will be as earnest and determined as he was, will, like him, receive the blessing which they crave.”[2]

[1] The Seventh-day Adventist Bible Commentary, Ellen G. White Comments (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Pub. Assn., 1956, 1980), vol. 5, p. 1111.

[2] Ellen G. White, in Review and Herald, Mar. 15, 1887.