I want to die. Please let me die.
RYAN: “I need to die. Let me die.”
SID: That’s the last thing you expected her to—
RYAN: I never anticipated her saying that. And I took my mother, I remember so vividly just pushing her back by her shoulders. And I said, “Mom, I need you to hear me as a man of God for a moment and not your son. And I need you to know that this is not God’s will for your life. If you will give me 40 days to pray and fast for your life, I will fight for you for the next 40 days. And at the end of the 40 days, if you do not feel like you can live, I will pray you into heaven. I will pray that God take you on, but let me fight for you.”
SID: This wasn’t preconceived. It just came out of you.
RYAN: It came out. So I did. I fasted, I prayed, I warred for my mother and I kid you not, on day 40 my phone rings and my mother says this—
Ryan, I have a reason to leave.
RYAN: “Ryan, I have a reason to live.”
I have grown grandkids to play.
RYAN: “I have grown grandchildren to play with.”
SID: You remember he purposely didn’t tell her that? Who told her? God had to.
RYAN: God brought the dream back to my mother. And that’s when I knew that God had renewed her mind. And restored that prophecy back into her life and she went home and has been cancer free ever since.
SID: What would you say that your mom learned? Your mom’s a spirit-filled believer, loves God, but what would you say she learned from this experience?
RYAN: I asked both my parents that question and they both said the same thing. They said they had to learn how to be able, with kindness, to tell people, “I don’t need to hear everything. I need to hear what God is saying.” Some people would come and they would have their stories and they would mean well, but you don’t realize sometimes how the enemy can creep in and just pull you down mentally and physically and emotionally. And they said, “The lesson I learned was to make sure that the greatest voice in my life was the voice of the Father.”
SID: God told you that you had, especially after revelation, that you don’t know anything about faith, that you have a life message that you’re supposed to be telling people.
RYAN: I did. I went back when the Lord said, “You don’t know anything about faith.” I thought, “How do I not know anything about faith, God?” I remember praying in that service. I fell to my knees, went down on my face and I quoted Hebrews 11:1, right off the bat. And I knew those things, but I went back and I read and I said, “What makes Abraham the father of all faith?” For years, I said, “He was the greatest because he said ‘Yes.’ He said yes to God.” But what was it? And I realized a lot of times what we call faith is really an encouragement from a previous event.
RYAN: We believe that people can get out of wheelchairs because we’ve seen others get out of wheelchairs. We believe backs can straighten up because we’ve seen backs and those are encouraging things. But it’s not necessarily faith. If you’ve never had an example of something, how can you believe for it? And I went back to Abraham’s life and in Genesis 22, Abraham was called by God to take his son, Isaac and sacrifice him. And I thought to myself, how did he do that? It’s not like he can say, you did it for George, so you’re going to do it for me. He had no examples.