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I learned this best in the most excruciating circumstances. My two perfect little twins came at twenty-four weeks of age. They were barely hanging by a thread. For two weeks they were given the best care possible, but our little girl, Isabella was weak. She got very sick, she had brain bleeds, she had heart issues. Still, we prayed and believed they would both make it. We were sure.

Then suddenly Bella took a turn for the worse, and they paged us to come in. Shocked, we listened as they told us we needed to say goodbye. Crushed, we prepared to let our little girl go. But first I prayed and asked God what on earth was going on…what do I do? Beg for healing? What? All the Bible verses in the world cannot take the place of God’s Spirit telling you what to do when you face life… or death. I was hugely freaked but I knew God had to tell me something or I would not be able to make it through the day.

Immediately words from Daniel chapter 3 came front and center to my brain. It was the words of three guys about to be burned alive for obeying God. In response to the threats of the king they said something like: You can try to kill us if you like, but know that our God can save us from you if he chooses to, and also, if he doesn’t we still believe in Him. That was it for me. We knew God could heal Bella if he chose, but if he didn’t we could still trust him. God chose not to intervene. It was a Thursday afternoon and we still trusted God, even in our overwhelming grief.

What happened next really drilled this point home. Two days after Bella passed, Isaac (her big brother) ruptured his intestine and he had surgery. Being only two days from the loss of Bella and knowing our little boy’s odds of making it were slimmer than slim (something like sixty percent mortality rate just going to the OR at his age), I wanted to just go home and sleep while our little guy was operated on. I had nothing within me to pray, the loss of Isaac seemed inevitable, and rapidly approaching.

But just like with Bella, I knew I couldn’t be trusted to think straight, so I asked the same question as before, what now God? What about Isaac? What do I do now? What do I pray? And just like the last time the Spirit of God impressed on my mind what to do: cry out for Isaac’s life. I opened my Bible and there was this random verse (Psalms 106:23) staring me in the face. It said how the Israelites were going to be destroyed but Moses stepped in and begged for their lives and God spared them. The message was clear to me: Stand up and beg for Isaac’s life.

I can’t begin to explain how hard this was for us. When you lose a baby you feel like all hope is gone. The last thing you want to do is hope for baby number two. Emotionally it was harder to believe he’d make it, and easier to just let him go. But God had told me to cry out, so my husband and I dragged ourselves to a conference room and began to pray. I walked up and down for a while, fighting the urge to give up, and then finally gave in to hope and began crying out and begging and hanging on for Isaac to make it. It was a huge turning point for me.

I will never forget that day, or what I learned. What I found true was that every circumstance is different and every person has their own unique journey that only God fully understands. For these reasons we have to listen for the daily, present tense revelation of God on what we need to do right now. This is our birthright—being born of the Spirit (John 3). We get to be in the know from moment to moment. We may not know why or how or anything else, but God will speak over us what we need to do, if we ask and listen.