As we trudge through village after village evangelizing to people, and praying over the sick and the lost, some of the team is getting discouraged because we want to see miracles happen like they did in the Bible. We all read about them and even hear about them from other squad mates.
I was praying the other day while running and just thinking on this for a moment….
Does God heal the unbelievers? They have no faith that He has the power to heal, does He heal them?
I asked this to my teammates during a nightly team time and we discussed it briefly with the logical answer that YES, He does. He will heal a person and perform miracles if He sees that He will claim the glory for it. Obviously this makes sense but I wonder further in to what that looks like. God is omniscient, so He knows how things are going to turn up before we even know about an event.
Some one once explained it to me in simpler terms comparing it to a parade. God can see the beginning and the end as well as the middle of the parade but because He has given us free will He intercedes at His discretion.
Every time we pray for a miraculous healing, He knows the outcome and even if it doesn’t appear in the form of the person being healed in that moment doesn’t mean He didn’t move through that situation.
The more I thought about it, the more I was upset with myself for having even the smallest bit of doubt in God.
I experience miracles everyday.
Some are more obvious than others but they are present in the way the earth turns, in the rising and setting of the sun, in the way that we are exactly the perfect distance from the sun to not burn up or freeze.
My time at GEMS taught me a lot about miracles and how they happen. Sharon was the adopted daughter of Brother Augustine Jebakumar (the Director at GEMS) and was 6 years old. Days after she was born she was left by the railroad tracks by her mother to be run over by the train. The train was delayed and she rolled down the bank away from the tracks. That is a miracle in itself, but the story doesn’t stop there. Wild dogs attacked her and devoured her left arm. She was taken to a hospital and the story was put in the newspaper. No one claimed the newborn and her medical bills were unpaid and treatment was halted. GEMS caught the news article and came to Sharon’s rescue and she was brought to the GEMS campus and placed in the Director’s home and adopted in to his family.
The miracles don’t stop at just this story, there are many more like it and the fact that I was able to know, and meet this little miracle was such a blessing. The day before we left GEMS to move on to Nepal a 7 day old baby girl showed up. She was left under a seat of a train coming from Nepal and the police brought her in the middle of the night to GEMS. The most amazing part of this story, to me is that the police who are incredibly corrupt have the sense to bring the abandoned children to a Christian campus to be raised and given for adoption. In a caste system that looks down upon Christians and to declare your faith means to join a lower caste even the government officials know and see the good that the Lord is doing even in Bihar, India.
In Luke 7: 11-17 Jesus raises a widow’s son who they are carrying out of the city in a coffin. After He spoke life into the young man he sat up out of the coffin and began to speak, the surrounding people were all filled with awe and began praising God. I am sure it was an incredible moment in time to observe a young man sit up and speak out after being dead. That is one solid moment though, the rest of the young man’s life was the real miracle because he was able to spend the rest of his life with his mother and know the power of Jesus Christ.
