This month a big part of our ministry was going with the pastors and leaders of the villages to visit people’s homes, talk to them, pray for them. They welcomed us and they welcomed prayer. We shared what God has done in our lives and we shared what Jesus would do in their life. We were humbled as we watched God’s power go before us and as we watched God bring spiritual and physical healing.
We prayed, God answered! Not because we are anything special but because He knew each person we came into contact with needed Him. They needed to see His power, feel his presence, and know they were loved. He wanted to use them and us to show His power and glory in their village.
During one visit as our translator Sam was speaking with a woman we had just prayed over, I became distracted by an elderly woman holding a baby who had come to sit next to me. I smiled and she smiled back, then what she did next puzzled me. She pinched my arm and then her arm, then she switched pinching her arm first then mine again. She then kept repeating something to me in Khmer, but I could not figure out what she was trying to convey, so I kept smiling and nodding.
As Sam finished speaking she walked to the middle of our group and began talking to Sam. He told us that she had bad pain in her knee and it was hard to straighten it and hard to walk. She also said that if our God would heal her knee then she would stop drinking alcohol, she would start going to church.
Immediately the thought in my head was that God wanted to do something in her heart more than He wanted to heal her knee. And our translator Sam must have been thinking a similar thing because He began speaking to her and afterwards he translated back to us what he had said. He shared the Gospel with her, he told her that God wanted her heart, wanted her to believe and trust Jesus. He asked her if she was ready to do that and she said yes. (It was a little bit more complex than this, but with translation things get simplified sometimes.) We prayed for her to trust Jesus and then we prayed that through Christ that just as He was healing her heart, He would heal her knee.
We got up from where we were huddled around her and then the woman excitedly began to touch her knee. She began pushing hard on it and stood up and started talking excitedly in Khmer. Sam didn’t need to translate that. God touched her heart! God healed her knee!
God blows me away by His power, love, and faithfulness. He continually humbles me by reminding me that He is God, that He is healer, He is love, He is strength. He humbles me by reminding me that apart from Him we can do nothing.
