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For all my resolve, I was shocked at my emotional disequilibrium: I was unable to predict or control my own tears, which erupted effusively at unexpected moments. Isaiah spoke to me again, revealing a similar intensity in the Lord's resolution: "Because I love Zion, because my heart yearns for Jerusalem, I cannot remain silent. I will not stop praying for her until her righteousness shines like the dawn, and her salvation blazes like a burning torch" (62:1).

I was soon to discover, however, that the problem with the all-out combat mode is that battle fatigue sets in before results. The more I prayed, fasted, and otherwise pulled out the stops in spiritual warfare, the more I expected measurable effects. When it became painfully evident that results were not part of this picture (at least at this point), the peaks of inspiration eventually were followed by troughs of dejection. This sense of powerlessness framed the third phase of my sojourn: discouragement.

Journal entry, October 1, 1996: "Surely in vain have I kept my heart pure; in vain have I washed my hands in innocence" (Ps. 73). I am so utterly discouraged. I don't go right to sleep at night so it is hard in the mornings to get up. Almost consistently, I am not rested. I hear the Devil whisper in my ear: "It doesn't do any good. Why not just sleep in and be rested?"

My son's increasingly frequent and unaccounted-for late nights meant that sleeplessness became a way of life. This only exacerbated the many conflicting emotions that assaulted me. My disorientation at times degenerated into hostility; my resolve metamorphosed to dejection. All of these emotions conspired to weigh me down with doubt about God's "intimate acquaintance" with my distress.

Again, late one night (always late at night) I got up and found an old copy of Augustine's Confessions. I saw in the contents the section titled "Grief of his mother Monnica at his heresy and prayers for his conversion."

Thou sentest Thine hand from above, drewest my soul out of that profound darkness, [as] my mother, thy faithful one, weeping to Thee for me … discerned the death wherein I lay. And Thou heardest her, O Lord; Thou heardest her and despised not her tears when, streaming down, they watered the ground under her eyes in every place where she prayed; yea, Thou heardest her.

The Lord sent Monica a dream showing her a vision of a "shining youth coming towards her, cheerful and smiling upon her, herself grieving, overwhelmed with grief." Augustine recounted that the dream assured his mother that "where she was, there was I also." She told her son the dream and he contradicted her interpretation, suggesting that it meant she would one day be where he was—without faith. "She was not perplexed by the plausibility of my false interpretation," he said. Her assurance "moved me more than the dream itself."

"Now more cheered with hope," he wrote, "yet no whit relaxing in her weeping and mourning, ceased not at all hours of her devotions to bewail my case unto Thee." A bishop comforted Monica, promising he would speak to her son: "Go thy way and God bless thee, for it is not possible that the son of these tears should perish." And in fact, when her son was 32 years old, many years after the dream, he finally stood "where she was" in the Lord.

I had no visions like Monica's to comfort me that night. But reading a former prodigal's own account of his mother's travail enabled me to drop off to sleep hearing the words he recounted repeatedly in his remembrances: Thou heardest her, O Lord.

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October 26 1998, Vol. 42, No. 12