You may recall the shocking case of Caroline Petrie, the nurse who was suspended from work not for praying for a patient, as some have said, but for offering to pray for a patient.Peter and Catriona Waitt describe a very different experience in the summer edition of Triple Helix, a magazine of the Christian Medical Fellowship.
They were out of doors with their nine-week-old daughter Eva Grace, who had previously been healthy, when the baby's heart stopped. She was resuscitated and taken to hospital, where she was appropriately cared for, but her condition deteriorated and sadly, she died six weeks later.
The first night in hospital the resident doctor stayed with them through the night and prayed with them, which they said was a tremendous comfort. On several occasions members of the nursing staff comforted them with Bible passages and personal examples of God's faithfulness. When they had a neurological consultation with a professor at a teaching hospital, he encouraged them to see their daughter as God created her to be. We are body, soul and spirit, he said, and although Eva's body was broken, she was still the same child God had made her to be. This helped immensely.
All this happened in Malawi, where the Waitts were working, and later in Johannesburg. If they had been in the UK, they said, it would have been a different story.
They also said that through Eva's life and especially during her illness, many people came to hear about the goodness of God.
