Consider the root of this plea. You cry out with groans for the body of your child, and rightly so, for a parent's love is a sharp spur to prayer. You ask that the inflammation be soothed and the passages opened. This is a natural grief, and God sees the tears of His servants. Yet I would have you press further, so that this sickness does not become a more grievous one for your own soul.
Think of the marvel you confess: that the Unoriginate Son of God suffered Himself to be called Son of David, to make you a son of God. If He took on this humiliation, will He not also tend the body He fashioned? But mark this: the power to heal is not a thing to be demanded like a slave giving orders to his master. When the blind men cried out, He did not rush to the miracle, but asked them, "Believe ye that I am able to do this?" He sought not merely a cry born of pain, but a faith that confessed Him as the very Lord of creation, the one who needs not to entreat another, but who commands and it is done. Let your prayer be not just for the calming of acid and the mending of eroded flesh, but a confession that He who is the True Son can speak a word and the lining of the esophagus must obey.
Now, while you rightly seek the physician’s skill, see that you do not fall into a worse inflammation of the soul. For just as a dropsical patient is not to be felicitated because he drinks whatever he pleases, so too a man in grief is not to be pitied if he makes his own suffering into an idol. The disease of the body is one thing, but the swelling of pride that demands its own will in all things is a raging fever far more dangerous. That burning fever, which pictures to itself monstrous fears and extravagant disasters, quenches the very faith for which Christ is looking. Do not let this illness inflame your heart with the lust to command God, but let it subdue you into the calm of one who says, "The Lord is able, and if He delays, His delay is lovingkindness."
You ask for his airways to be opened. Let this be the hour your own spiritual eyes are opened wider. You see your son’s body laboring, blind and maimed by sickness. See also that our souls are often just the same, brilliant and ornamented one minute, then lame and broken by surfeiting and pride the next. The prayer "night and day" which you offer is good, a sign of a soul longing to see a pleasant harvest. But do not be as one who hears the word ten times and seems insensible, only waiting for a single sudden blow of relief. The very waiting, the very begging, is the medicine curing your own soul. The blow that brings down the tree comes only after many strokes have loosened the root. Continue therefore to cry out, not as to a reluctant master, but as to the Physician who sometimes permits the fever to burn so that the deeper sickness might be brought low.
Let your trust be in His power to mend what is broken, as you have said, but see that you mean His power, not a power that must bow to your timetable. He who delayed to judge the world so that sinners might wash away their transgressions also sometimes delays healing so that faith might be perfected. This is the meaning of His love; it has a kind of proportion. Bring therefore the dogged, persistent faith of the blind men, who followed Him even into the house. Bring a faith that does not merely seek a gift, but falls silent before the Giver, knowing that for the soul laboring under the dropsy of anxiety, submission to the Physician is already the beginning of the cure.