You ask for health and a child and success for your husband, and you submit all to God's will. This is well. But I would have you examine your heart with greater care. Do you seek these gifts only that you may rejoice in them, or that through them you may glorify God? When we pray for temporal blessings, we must be ready to receive them or to be denied them with equal thanksgiving. For if your health is restored, but you use it to pursue vain comforts, what have you gained? If a child is given, but you love the child more than the Giver, you have made an idol of your own flesh. And if your husband secures that position, yet his heart grows proud, he has suffered a loss though his purse be full.
The pagan runs to charms and amulets when his child is sick, thinking to buy safety with a bit of string and muttered words. You say you are a Christian. Then where is your weapon? The sign of the Cross is your only amulet, the name of Jesus your only incantation. Do you trust in that, or do you seek signs and wonders? The woman who refuses to bind an amulet on her child, choosing rather to see the child die in the arms of God than live by idolatry, she is a martyr. She has sacrificed what she loved most upon the altar of true faith. I do not say this to wound you, but to wake you. Many come to the church asking for healing and babies and jobs, yet they have never made their souls ready to receive the Holy Thing. They have envy, they have slander on their lips, they are dull of hearing because they feast on the passions. How can a vessel full of vinegar receive sweet wine?
If your husband gains this interview and fails, will you bless the Lord? If the child is delayed, will you say with Job, "The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord"? The thief breaks in and steals your treasure; but whether it is loss or gain depends on you. Give thanks, and you have stored up riches in heaven. Wail and curse, and you have doubled the robbery. So it is with every earthly hope.
I say these hard words not because I despise your longings. I know the pain of a barren womb and the anxiety of an uncertain table. But I love you enough to wound, that the wound may heal clean. Pierce your heart now with these truths, and they will become a medicine, not a punishment. The discourse that tells of hell is the most delightful of all, because it keeps you from falling into it. The word that galls today is the cure that spares you tomorrow.
Therefore pray for these things, but pray more earnestly that God will give you the grace to be vanquished neither by success nor by disappointment. Seek the kingdom first, and all else will be added, or taken away, for your blessing. Let your husband go to his interview clothed in humility, which no man can take from him, rather than in a fine coat purchased by pride. Let your body be given to the Physician of souls, who may cure or not cure, as He knows best. And let your longing for a child be a longing to present another citizen to the heavenly Jerusalem, not a trophy to your own name.
I do not cease to speak of these things, though you may think you have heard them ten times and remained unmoved. The tree receives many blows before it falls, and the last blow seems to do the work alone. Yet without the earlier strokes, the wood would not yield. So it is with your soul. The word of God strikes again and again, seeming to leave no mark, until one day, by grace, the whole trunk of your sin topples. I am confident that you who love to hear the truth will at last bring forth fruit. Do not grow weary. Do not despise the small daily bitterness that comes with instruction. It is the taste of medicine, not poison.
May the Lord grant you not necessarily what you desire, but what makes you holy. And if He gives the child, the job, the health, then let them be as altars upon which you offer constant thanksgiving, lest they become snares. You are the master of injuring or not injuring yourself. No circumstance can harm you unless you consent. Hold fast to this, and live.
Prayer Focus: God, Thank You for loving me. Thank You for loving me, Jesus. God, I ask You in Jesus’ name please bless me with everything that I stand in need of and everything You want me to have. 
