How great is your love for your son, that you bring his suffering so fervently before the throne of God. Yet consider: if God Himself endured the rejection and agony of the cross to make you His child, will He not attend to the temporal afflictions of your son, whom He also desires to be His own? He suffered a slave to be father to Him, that He might make the Lord Father to you a slave. This is the measure of his care, that He permits seasons of bodily trial not as abandonment, but as a call to deeper trust. The burning inflammation you describe, the blocked passages, the erosion of his flesh, these are not hidden from the eyes of Him who formed that body in the womb.
But let your prayer rise not only for the soothing of the esophagus, the clearing of the lungs, and the regulation of what is disordered. For a greater danger lurks when the soul contracts a dropsy of pride or a fever of self-will, and that spiritual inflammation proves harder to quench than any bodily acid. There are many who, while seeking physical cure, remain indifferent to the diseases of the soul, and this is a more grievous thing than the disease itself. As for one in disease not to be obedient to the physician’s injunctions is a more serious evil than the being diseased, so too the health of the body, if gained without the health of the soul, leaves a man maimed within. Pray then that his whole being, the inner man foremost, be restored to soundness, that the very trial of his flesh might become a medicine for humility, a lesson that we seek nothing beyond a sufficiency.
Do not imagine that Christ’s healing hand is moved by mere pity without requiring faith, as though all must be saved indiscriminately. Even His love to man has a kind of proportion, depending on the faith of them that are healed. He asks in every generation, “Believe ye that I am able to do this?” Believe, then, not only that He can entreat the Father, but that He, being the Son of God, has authority in Himself to command the body’s rebellion to cease. Cling to this with your son. Let him hear the commandments and treasure them, for he that heareth them loveth the Son and the Father also. And if the healing delays, if the physicians’ treatments seem slow, be not like the impatient patient who despises the regimen. The time of seeming delay is itself a mark of great lovingkindness, that we might wash away negligence and learn to wait upon the Lord.
Even if you have prayed often and seen no immediate fruit, do not cease. How many, who have heard ten times and remained insensible, have afterward at one hearing been converted! The repeated petitions are like blows upon a tree that at last bring it down; the final answer relies upon all that came before. So continue to besiege heaven not only for the regulation of acid and the opening of airways, but that your son, through this furnace, might come forth as a refined vessel fit for the Master’s use. Trust that the Lord who permits the disease can also make it the very path to a more luminous health, one in which both body and soul give thanks without ceasing. Though the body suffers, let your hope be anchored here: that He who raises the dead will in His own time and way restore what is broken, and more importantly, bring your son to that eternal life where no erosion or inflammation can ever threaten again.
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. 
