The day after we arrived in Kigali, Rwanda, my team was split up and my teammate, Lori, and I went with our translator to a home where we met a mother and her daughters and were invited inside to tell them about a God who loves them.
I think I missed the holiness of that day, and I think that now – almost a year and a half later – I’m starting to be floored by how much I truly missed.
I’m not one to memorize scripture systematically. In the past, it’s made me feel that I’d never be able to share the gospel with people, because I felt so unknowledgeable. In that hour with those women, the Lord brought 19 passages of scripture to my mind – chapter and verse – to share with them. When we were done, we asked them what they thought of Jesus, and they began quoting those passages back to me. They wanted to know this Jesus.
The Lord is bigger than my inability to systematically memorize scripture. He never asked me to make notecards, He asked me to give my life to Him, and He was faithful to meet me in the time I took to meet with Him.
After we prayed with the women we were visiting, they asked us to pray for one of the daughters. Her eyes had been bothering her for a long time. They were swollen and watering – but I was having my own eye trouble.
Even as I stood before her and placed my palms over her eyes, I wished the Lord were preparing to heal me. I couldn’t focus on what it possibly meant that I knew with everything in my being that I was supposed to pray for her with my hands right there on her face.
I don’t remember the prayer, but I doubt that it was a string of ceremonial pleas to the Father. If I had to guess, I’d bet it was more along the lines of, “Father, you adore your daughter. Bring your healing in Jesus’ name. Do your thing, Holy Spirit. Comfort your daughter. Amen.”
I lifted my hands off her eyes, and they were wide open. The whites of her eyes were calm and bright, and she began to laugh and to exclaim, “It’s finished! It’s finished!”
Me and Lori with two of the women who met Jesus that day, the one in red is the one whose eyes were healed.
*Photo from Lori Clemons
I didn’t think twice about it. I didn’t thank God for moving, or for the honor it was for him to move through me. I didn’t realize how sacred that moment was.
The beautiful girl followed us through the rest of her neighborhood repeating, “It’s finished! It’s finished!”
A few of my teammates saw her the next day, she was working at the local bar, and she ran to greet them and threw her arms around them – and then ran around the bar again, shouting “It’s finished!” and sharing with everyone there what God had done for her the day before.
God had really, truly healed someone under my hands for the third time.
Just a few weeks prior, another teammate walked into a home in Tanzania and a boy was lying on the ground; he barely looked conscious. We learned he had malaria and his fever had been that high for days, his mom and siblings didn’t know what to do for him but pray, and they asked for us to join them. I laid my hands on his burning skin and asked the Lord to intervene in Jesus’ name. The boy’s skin broke out in a sweat, and by the time we left the house, he was sitting up, talking, and laughing – three things he hadn’t done in days.
The boy in front is the boy who was healed of malaria.
*Photo by Caroline Player
Two months before that, I’d felt the Lord knit a little girl’s bones together under my hand in Nepal. I got to watch her run, and skip, and play – pain-free – for the first time in her life.
I did my 114th World Race interview yesterday, and when I asked, “what are you hoping to experience on this trip?” I heard it again: “I want to see God move.”
Later in our conversation, the same girl said something else that I’ve heard a hundred times, “I haven’t seen healing, but I believe in it. I would love to see God move that way.”
I had no idea when I applied for the Race that some people pray for healing and expect to see it – and do. I never asked for it, but God wanted me to see it, and He chose me to be involved in it – and I missed the holiness in it.
Even as that girl followed us around her village in Rwanda, excitedly repeating that her eyes had just been healed, I just wondered why she didn’t go back home. My thoughts were too consumed with when I’d get my new glasses, if I’d have time to do laundry later, or when I’d get to use the internet next to acknowledge the miracle we had just born witness to.
Father, forgive me. I’m starting to get it now.
God showed up in the physical, and I didn’t even recognize Him. I have seen the glory of God, and I turned my back in distracted, selfish ignorance – too focused on the future to appropriately revere the sacredness of the present.
*Photo by AJ LeVan
But we’re so limited. The Word is a lamp unto our paths…do you know how far ahead a lamp illuminates anything? Maybe three and a half feet. Not far.
We are designed to meet with God in the present – He is here, He is so real! His presence is sacred, and holy; and through the blood of Christ, the veil is torn and we are invited into the holy to meet with the Lord anytime we choose to be with Him.
Mary and Sarah both received the same message from God: they were both going to bear a child when it was impossible that they would conceive. Mary said, “Why me? I have nothing good to offer,” and Sarah laughed as if God weren’t capable. They both gave birth to sons who changed the course of history, their responses didn’t change the will of God – but I think that Sarah missed out on a holy moment. I think Sarah missed out when God was trying to tell her that He saw her, and loved her; was with her, and knew the desires of her heart.
I don’t want to laugh in disbelief anymore. I don’t want my own thoughts and concerns to distracted me from the sacred. I don’t want to miss the holy, so I will choose to open my eyes and to see God where He is moving – and I will join Him in His work according to His will – because He is moving in love, despite my attitude. May my response moving forward always be, “I love you, too, Father.”
"I made you promises a thousand times
I try to hear from heaven, but I talk the whole time
I think I made you too small
I never feared you at all –
If you touched my face, would I know you?
Looked into my eyes, could I behold you?
What do I know of you, who spoke me into motion?
Where have I even stood, but the shore along your ocean?
Are you fire, are you fury? Are you sacred? Are you beautiful?
What do I know, what do I know of holy?"
