Persevering Prayer: Chip Watts Testimony

A Testimony of God’s Unfailing Love

The Journey, Winter 2023

Written by Chip Watts

“Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them they should always pray and not give up.” - Luke 18:1

How do you learn?

I learn by doing the same thing over and over until I finally get it right.

I learn by stumbling along, falling on my face, but getting back up to keep trying.

***Chip hiking in Boone with his dog, Cocoa, in Boone***

I was horrible at playing guitar for the first year that I owned one. It was a gift from my parents after they broke the news that we were moving to Sanford, a town where Dad would be pastoring a new church. After a year of standing in front of a mirror, pretending to play, I finally started guitar lessons and began to learn. I had to play each chord, then each song, over and over until I’d finally get it right. Eventually, I became a competent guitarist.

Perseverance…

I learn by doing the same thing over and over until I finally get it right. Far more important than becoming a competent guitarist, I’ve set my sights on becoming a man of prayer.

I was horrible at praying when 13-year-old me offered up my brief (but sincere) first prayer: “God, if You’ll let me be famous, I’ll help people.” That embarrassing-to-mention first prayer left a lot to be desired.

A year later, I woke up in a hospital ICU with little recall of the scary past couple of days I had been through. My dad came in and gently told me that I had come very, very close to dying due to an ailment called Reye’s Syndrome. I’d been on the verge of death for hours and lots of folks in our town had been praying, some praying side-by-side with my parents in hospital hallways.

When Dad left the ICU room a little later, I was stunned by what he had told me. I prayed my second prayer: “God, I almost died. The rest of my life is Yours.”

Nothing really changed in my life immediately afterward except that I began to distance myself from some friends who I knew were bad influences. I suppose that was an important step of obedience, but it took me into a painful, nearly friendless year or so.

But something significant happened toward the end of that lonely junior high school year. One of my few friends called out to me across a classroom when we were choosing the classes we would take in our first year of high school. He said, “Hey, Chip, let’s sign up for drama class!”

I put a check in the drama class box, thinking, “Why not? I might find friends there.”Sure enough, I did. I made many good friends in drama class and drama club, in school plays and musicals and in a community theater group I became part of.

Several months later, one of these new friends invited me and another friend to come with him to a Christian “Coffee House” called The Mustard Seed. This was my first experience of a Christian gathering outside of the Presbyterian churches I had grown up in. I heard a Christian rock band that night called The Second Coming Band.

Back then in 1979, it was still pretty unusual to hear Christian music performed by a live band with thundering bass, pounding drums and electric guitar. That got my attention. But they also talked and sang about Jesus Christ as someone you could know, not just know about. I knew about God, but that night I was invited into a relationship with a Person I could know and talk to, turn to and walk with.

Something big happened inside of me as I listened to the band that night. I responded to their message, raising my hand high when the guitar player asked who wanted to give their lives to Jesus. A door opened in my heart.

It was like my heart started beating for the first time and my eyes saw color for the first time. It was like taking that first big breath after you've been underwater too long. It was new blood coursing through my veins. My spirit came alive.

Within a week, some of my friends and I traveled out of town to see The 2nd Chapter of Acts, another musically excellent, but more widely known, Christian band. It happened again— that great born-all-over-again feeling. At the close of that concert, I was standing with both of my hands lifted high above my head, giving all of myself to Jesus.

That’s when I prayed another memorable prayer: “God, I’m giving You my hands. I want to play music for You.” After this, learning to play music for Him and learning to pray began to accelerate in my life.

Praying was a little awkward at first and pretty selfish. I would run out of things to say within five minutes and I knew I was mostly just praying for me. So I asked the Holy Spirit to help me.

I had read Jesus’ words in which He said, “But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things.” (John 14:26) I wanted to learn to pray more deeply. I wanted to know God better, to love Him with my heart and to please Him in all my ways. So I asked the Holy Spirit to fill me with Himself. Consequently, I learned to expand my prayers beyond my own interests and began praying for others—my family, my friends and those all around me who had not yet come to know Jesus.

It was shortly after this that I started dating Melody, the girl who would become my wife. She was 17 and I was 18. Two weeks into our relationship, I knew I wanted to marry her. I wasn’t really interested in going to college. Playing guitar and being a part of my local Christian rock band was much more interesting. But Melody was planning to attend Appalachian State University, and I soon decided to go as well.

Those college years are when I began to learn about persevering in prayer. From when we began to date, it would be four and a half years before we were finally married. In those four and a half years, I poured out prayer that the Lord would overcome our obstacles, hasten the day of our marriage and allow us to spend our lives together serving Him. Those prayers were supplemented by long prayer journal entries and dozens of prayer songs I wrote.

Praying to be married began to grow me up in my prayer life. I began to be able to pray for longer periods of time and, consequently, I found it easier to pray over other situations that the Holy Spirit brought to my attention. Finally, in late 1985, my answered prayer walked down the aisle, beautiful in white, and we were married. My Dad performed our marriage ceremony. We left Boone and began our married life in the town where we first met.

A couple of years into our marriage, when Melody and I were ready to have children, we were blind-sided and steam-rolled by eight words from a fertility specialist at Duke University Medical Center: “It is impossible for you to have children.”

That was so painful.

Months after surviving a roller coaster of emotions and many tears, Melody and I rolled up our sleeves and got to work—the hard work of praying for the impossible

“For nothing will be impossible with God.” (Luke 1:37)

We learned that praying for the impossible required a deepening of faith and soul-blistering perseverance in the face of nay-sayers and all evidence to the contrary. It required a greater depth of prayerfulness than we had ever known.
The Lord led us back to Boone, to a wonderful church and faith-filled believers who joined us in praying for the impossible—that we would be able to have children. Melody taught at a Christian School then. Every morning, her students prayed, “God, please help Mrs. Watts to have children.”

We were ready and willing to adopt, but never quite felt led to that holy calling.

Against-all-odds prayer for children was a big part of our lives for years. Melody was really good at fasting-prayer; some of her friends prayed and fasted with her.

Again, as I poured out prayer, I bolstered my faith by writing lots of songs and poems and by filling volume after volume of prayer journals.

***Chip & Melody with their daughter, Maggie***

On our 15th wedding anniversary, we learned that Melody was pregnant with our daughter, Maggie.

Interestingly, I learned later that at the very beginning of our struggle with infertility and the long years of praying for children, God had put an idea into the mind of a doctor in Saint Louis. He shared that idea with colleagues in the Netherlands. After several years, that idea led to the answer to our prayers and the prayers of many others who were longing to be parents.

Hence, I learned a vital truth about prayer: when nothing seems to be happening, things are happening. Melody and I had no idea through our years of praying that substantial progress toward our answered prayer was actually happening, but it was.

When we first walked into that Saint Louis doctor’s office to receive his good help, we saw a framed prayer on his wall that began, “God above, before I begin my holy work of healing Your creation, I lay my plea before You, that You will grant me the strength of spirit and the vast energy to do my work with faith…” (Author unknown)

I was amazed that even this world-renowned physician acknowledged the importance of prayer.

Remember…

When nothing seems to be happening, things are happening.

Keep praying.

After our daughter, Maggie, was born, we entered into another 5 years of prayer leading to the birth of our son, Luke. Prayer walks became a big part of my life in those years and I kept track of the miles I prayer-walked specifically for our son’s birth: 740 miles!

***Maggie with her baby brother, Luke***

I tracked those locally walked miles on a United States map from where we lived at the time as if I was actually walking all the way to Saint Louis. We were finally financially able to return there just over 4 years after Maggie’s birth. Again, those years were filled with loads of prayer journal entries and more songs in which I presented those “definite requests” spoken of in Philippians 4:

“Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and definite requests, continue to present your needs to God. And the peace of God which transcends understanding and surpasses comprehension shall guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” (paraphrase based on the Amplified Bible)

After Luke was born, we moved back to Sanford, the town where Melody and I met. Settling into life in central North Carolina with our two children, we soon were hoping and beginning to pray that God would make a way for us to return to our very favorite place: Boone. We had moved back down-mountain when we had children, in part to be closer to the grandparents. But our hearts were always in Boone and we visited frequently.

So we began to pour out prayer for return. There were hundreds more miles of prayer walks, more prayer songs were written, and more prayer journals filled.

***Chip, Melody, Luke, and Maggie at Grand Teton National Park***

I was the hesitant one, always fearful that there wouldn’t be jobs for us in Boone. But 20 years after leaving, we have returned. Melody has her “dream job.” She always hoped she might work at Parkway Elementary School, and she is a 5th-grade teacher there now. I have successfully transitioned to a job as a home health speech therapist—enjoying driving through these mountains that I have loved for so many years.

Nowadays, I’m prayer-hiking—and happily loving every moment.

God is expanding my prayer focus from my own personal hopes and dreams to the needs of the nations—praying for the persecuted church; praying that the Church in my own country might, undistracted, focus on the glory of Christ; that God’s will would be accomplished throughout the earth.

Of course, much of my praying is still for God’s will to be accomplished in and through my little flock—my dearly-loved wife and our children. I’m eager to see what God will continue to do as we all continue in this grace of prayer.