So for our ministry one day, three of my teammates and a translator got to go around in the community and just talk with people and pray over people.
After about 15 minutes of wandering aimlessly and only talking to a few people, our translator (Sylvia) stepped in in a big way and suggested that we take some time and pray individually to see where God was leading us.
Let me back up for just a sec… the night before when I was going to bed I felt absolutely horrible. I just prayed that if God wanted me to stay home the next day to keep me feeling bad, but if He had work for me to do, then I wanted to be healed. I woke up the next morning feeling better than I had in a long time. So I knew that God had something for us to do that day.
Back to prayer time… During my time of just listening to God, He said that somebody was supposed to be healed through our work that day. Although He told me that somebody was supposed to be healed through our work, He would not tell me where we were supposed to go. He just said that we are His Kingdom and that all we had to do was just walk around and the person would find us because of our light.
Lucas had a vision of a crown. He perceived it that we were crowned with the power of Christ and that we should walk in that authority throughout the day. Very similar to what God had said to me. Due to this authority, we all believed that the person that we needed to see and minister to would find us and that we would not have to find them. So we set out from that prayer time with a new purpose and a new outlook on the day.
After about ten minutes of walking around, Christy had a vision of a local cemetery. I didn’t know where it was nor did I know that one was even in the area. Luckily, Sylvia knew exactly where she was talking about, so we set out to go there. After arriving at the cemetery, I sat down and started to plead to God. I was pretty ticked off that He was testing my patience that day. Patience is definitely the thing God is teaching me the most about this month, so it was fitting that today would involve pushing my patience to the limit. I was just asking if God would essentially hurry up!! When I was close to being done pleading with God, He just said to look up. Directly in front of me was a trash can with some arrows pointing down to the ground. So after asking God to hurry up, He was telling me to sit down.. thanks God!! About 5 seconds after I saw the arrows telling me to sit down, I looked over and a man had approached Sylvia about us maybe giving him a Bible. She asked me if I wanted to talk to this guy. Of course I jumped up and almost sprinted over there. We struck up a conversation and asked if there was anything we could pray for him about. He said that he had hemorrhoids and was slightly addicted to alcohol. So we prayed for him and just proclaimed freedom in his life. His countenance was different after we prayed and a couple days later when we saw him again he testified that he was feeling much better. This was cool in itself, but while we were praying for this man, God told me that he knew where we were supposed to go next. This is fitting, because this man is the watchman over the cemetery, so the spiritual implications of a watchman were definitely in action at that moment. As he was walking away, I told Sylvia to ask him if he knew if somebody was sick in the surrounding area. As soon as she asked him, he started going in great detail about where to go and who to talk to when we got there. Thank you God for the courage to speak out what you were telling me!
Oh yeah… a little snippet about this man’s name. His name is Victor Reyes. Which, if you do a little bit of Spanglish translating, it means victorious kings. Kind of fit in with the vision Lucas had been given.
So after receiving instructions from the watchman, we headed out to where he said to go. It actually wasn’t very far away from the cemetery. When we got to where we were supposed to go, the family welcomed us in, got us chairs, and begged us to sit down. Immediately we struck up a conversation with an older man named Antonio. He is probably in his 60’s or 70’s. Right from the start he apologized and said that he was drunk. It was only about 11 in the morning and this man was obviously very intoxicated. He then said that he was very fearful of when God returns, because he believed that God would not forgive him for being addicted to alcohol. At this moment, I looked over at Lucas and Christy and said that I was about to blow this guys mind, because of what authority God had already given us that day. I told him that we had come as the Kingdom of God that day, and that if he wanted it he could receive forgiveness and eternal life that day. We had come that day to do the exact opposite of what he believed the Kingdom of God would do.
During our time of prayer we could feel and audibly hear the man gaining his freedom from his addictions and slave to sin. After the prayer both Christy and I felt like Antonio should verbalize his need for Christ and express the freedom he had just received in Christ. He willfully raised his hands and after a few nonchalant attempts at declaring freedom, Antonio shouted that he had been freed in Jesus name. Praise God, a man received freedom and salvation for the first time!!
….Pictures of both men should be coming soon
