Healing in Madagascar
Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. John 14:12
Jesus performed healings on the sick, the deaf, & the blind. It is mind blowing that he gives us the ability to do the same thing. When I decided to come on the World Race I was 26 years old and had never seen healings lived out. This is something that I really wanted to be apart of while on the race. If I’m honest, I didn’t have much faith in the power of healing or that it was something that I could do. I had lost that faith a few years back.
In December of 2009 my father, Barry, told my brother and I that he had liver cancer. In times like this is where people lean on God for strength. This is where I found myself for the next year of my life. My father went through chemotherapy and had to stop working due to the toll it was taking on his body. It was a difficult time but I was never afraid of losing him. I always believed that he would be healed. A year had passed since we were told the news and he wasn’t getting any better. My mother called me one day and told me there wasn’t much more the doctors could do for him. They were going to try one more type of medicine. If it didn’t work that would be it for him. Even hearing all of this I still had faith that he would be healed from this disease. A week later in a booth of my college cafeteria I got a call from my mom that the medications hadn’t worked. Within a few weeks my dad had passed away. My heart was broken and my faith was really shaken. I was angry with God for not healing my father and I began let fear and doubt set in. I still believed in God but I didn’t know why my father wasn’t healed. Did I not have enough faith? God has a plan all of his own and I couldn’t see that. I doubted what Jesus talked about with faith in healing. Over the years since then I have continuously prayed that God would restore my faith and give me abundantly more than before. A little more than a year ago God was calling me to go on an 11 month mission trip. I believed the prayer I had been praying for would be answered.
Month three our entire squad was together in Madagascar. Each week our team had a different ministry and week two was by far the most life changing. This week we were doing street evangelism in the center of a village. We split up to go spread the word in the community that my teammate Ryan would be delivering a message that everyone should hear. It was a beautiful sunny day and I felt Gods presence in this community. I could tell today was going to be special and I didn’t want one person to miss out on it. I had two translators with me as we walked around stopping everyone in sight. I was talking with a man when an elderly woman walked right behind me and I asked one of the translators to stop her. She was a little lady that couldn’t have been more than 70 years old. We started talking and I asked if she needed prayer for anything. She told me she had a lot of pain in her right wrist as well as her left knee. I laid my hands in the places where she felt the most pain and began to pray for her. There wasn’t anything special about the words I said, but as I was finishing she threw her arms in the air and started praising God. I asked her if she felt pain leave her body. She said yes, hardly any of the pain that was once there remained. I just witnessed God healing this woman and I was blown away. It was the most beautiful thing to see this woman’s face after receiving healing. But God wasn’t done for the day. Ryan spoke as we prayed for people in the town square. One by one people came to receive prayer. It felt like something out of the bible. Two of my teammates prayed with two people from the town. One was blind and the other was deaf; God healed both of them! It wasn’t by anything we said or did that changed these people. It was because of the glory and power of Jesus Christ. I had been praying for the Lord to restore my faith in healing on the race and that’s exactly what He did. He didn’t just show me what healing looks like but He brought me into it. The bible isn’t a bunch of old stories that happened a long time ago. It is as real today as it was when it was written.
