| Prayer Request: Missionary David Allen | |||
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| Netlore Archive | |||
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Email text contributed by Jennifer Urana, 7 February 2001:
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Subject: Prayer Request Dear Friends and Family, The prayer for this Southern Baptist Missionary needs to be forwarded to everyone you know that can pray. Pray diligently and then send it along today!!!! Ezekiel David Allen is a young missionary on the Chiang Mai,Thailand mission team. He is critically ill with an unknown parasite and apparently WILL DIE WITHIN TWO MONTHS unless there is an intervention by the Lord. Please help create a global blanket of prayer for David, Michelle, and their four-month old daughter, Brianna. From: David Allen: My condition is serious now. The body is beginning to break down because I have no more fat or nutrient reserves. My diet consists mostly of vegetable broth, Gatorade, and saltine crackers. I tried homemade bread a few weeks ago and ended up in the emergency room. I am in constant pain and have taken painkillers regularly. The severe diarrhea has continued for seven weeks, and I have been in the emergency room five times. In the last three days, there have been sharp pains in my kidneys so they are running tests to see if my kid neys are infected. So far, eight doctors have not been able to diagnose the parasites. One lab in Dallas thought they had a positive diagnosis (a rare parasite called cryptosporidium), but the Public Health Center of Disease Control in Houston said it was an incorrect diagnosis. They have found agents, but no one has ever seen them before or can identify them. One is a parasite, and the other looks more like an amoeba. One of the effects of the parasites is to prevent my GI from absorbing nutrition. The CDC in Atlanta is three to six months behind, so they cannot help in time. My doctors are trying everyone else. They are in contact with one of the top infectious disease doctors in Thailand and several of the experts here in the states. I believe that the pictures of the parasites are to be passed around until someone can identity them. I am not doing well. I feel like I am in a very dark valley right now. I have been praying for so long for help with no response that I have become discouraged in prayer. This is a first for me in my life. Michelle and my parents are being a tremendous support for me, but they are having a hard time seeing me suffer so much. My prayers now are very elemental "Father, save me!" But the pain continues each day, and I continue to lose weight. Please pray not only for my body but for my spirit. I have not known fear like this before. I don't want to be fearful, and I don't need to be fearful because I am confident in my salvation. I think my fear is related more to the thought of not being with my wife and the new baby. This was the happiest time of my life before I became sick David Allen We are encouraging everyone we know to lift up David and his family before the Lord of Lords. Please forward this message to those you think will join us in this global chain of prayer. Thanks,
Life is good because God IS. P.S. Please send this out to all your friends, sisters, brothers, and other relatives. |
As he himself has written, when missionary David Allen was flying home to the United States in March 1997 he began to experience excruciating stomach pains, and became fearful. By May of that year he was hospitalized and was being fed intravenously. Before going into the hospital he wrote an email to a mission team in Thailand, and thus began the whole ball of wax. Prayer requests have been circulating ever since.
Very quickly he received something on the order of 7,000 emails. "My family received telephone calls from morning until evening for months," he writes. It was overwhelming.
But then, quite suddenly, "probably in answer to prayer," David Allen relates, the stomach infection cleared up. His health rapidly returning, he made plans to return to Thailand by the following January.
Eight months into 1998 found him writing in the Chiang Mai Netletter, "Somehow, the news of last year's illness has been again circulating through email as if it were a new situation. The internet is an amazing communications tool, but it is impossible to control."
He makes the point very well. As of this writing in February 2001, word of his illness is still in circulation through email forwards, as if it were news. David Allen once needed our prayers, but not any longer. Let's pray instead for an end to the circulation of this pointless message.
Comments: This is another case of a prayer request that, like a toy being powered by that well-known battery company, just keeps going ... and going....
