I realized today that I have been horrible at keeping up with blogging over the last few months! In an effort to catch up, I’m going to write a small series of different stories adapted from journal entries from the last few months. Different moments from the Race to show some of the amazing things God has done. I hope you enjoy and forgive me for my absence!
God has not forgotten Jesse
Journal Entry from Tuesday Night, March 24th in Hyderabad, India.
Tonight I felt the tears of a mother drop onto my hands as I held her and her baby boy in my arms. She was sobbing, but it was something more. More than just crying, more than just mourning. It was the sound a mother makes when she realizes that no matter how tightly she holds her baby, he is still slipping away.
Her baby boy, Jesse, is slowly dying.
With a failing liver and a myriad of other problems, medicine could only do so much. Yet even with medical help available, the family can’t afford all of the surgeries needed to help Jesse, so his mother brings him to Covenant Worship as often as possible for prayer. She came late tonight, just showing up and asking anyone there to pray for her son. Our whole team went down to pray with her when we heard she was there.
I sat beside her on the bench holding her, and that was a moment that really struck me. It was the moment when my arms were around her, her tears falling down the hand I had on Jesse as I prayed for him, looking into his jaundice eyes with my hand on his little distended belly. In that moment the reality of the situation sunk in. Her cries were the wails of a mourning mother weeping for the future of her child. The son she held, her little boy, would die without help. There is no money to try and extend his life a bit with medicine; there was no easy answer. All she and her family could do is cry out to God to save their son.
Then God started teaching a lesson about who He is. As she cried, Jesse’s mother began shaking so hard her mother took Jesse for a bit so we could hug her and pray over her. The grandmother began preparing a bottle for Jesse, and in that moment God put a message on my heart, that the formula his grandmother was feeding Jesse was… wrong. That the bottle she was feeding her little grandson was harming him instead of helping. I kept getting these feelings, but I brushed them aside. I kept thinking ‘Babies need food. What else is she going to feed him?’. How could I object to what he needed? I held my peace, prayed for him, and didn’t mention anything.
Wednesday Afternoon:
Today Devon, a teammate also gifted with prophecy, looked at me and asked, “did you feel something wrong with that formula?”. In that moment, I was like ‘God, how did I ignore what you were telling me????’. Her questions was an affirmation of what I was feeling the night before. I went to our contact, the co-ordinator of the worship school, and talked to her about what Devon and I had felt.
How she reacted was a HUGE inspiration to me.
She listened to what I had to say and took us seriously. She didn’t ask “why would you think that?” or “what do you mean by wrong?”. She trusted in what God had told us and immediately contacted Jessie’s family to talk to them about the formula they were feeding him. It turns out that the family had been using the wrong type of formula mixed with bad water. For a healthy child, it might have made them a bit sick. For a baby as sick as Jesse, the formula and water were doing unknown amounts of harm.
That moment I felt so convicted about who God is. God is the Father of us all. He cares enough about a little boy named Jesse to give the same message to TWO of His daughters about the baby formula. And God cared enough about Devon and I to not only trust us with those messages, but allow us to have a second chance at passing on that message when we didn’t trust ourselves that we heard the right message the first time. What an amazing way to both reveal his nature and show me how He is growing gifts in my own life.
That’s who God is, and He had not forgotten Jesse.
