This month we spent a good bit of our time praying for the sick. Hospital ministry was a big part of our month… both in Uganda, and on our team.
Sickness overtook the team this month.. 4 out of 6 on our team were in and out of the hospital all month. There wasn't a week this month that one of us were not in the hospital. Four of us got malaria, and I was the lucky one who got typhoid and malaria at the same time.
Since my dad passing, hospitals have always been a struggle for me. This month, the idea of doing hospital ministry weekly terrified me. The hospital we visited in Uganda, to pray for the locals, had one ridiculously similar hallway to the hallway I walked down in Macon, GA to find out my dad had passed. At the beginning of the month I began to have vivid flashbacks of the day of my dad passing… Never before had I experienced this, so I had no clue what to do with them, and they all started the day we began to go to the Ugandan hospital to pray for healing for the locals. From day one of doing hospital ministry, I was stuck in my own world of fear… Struggling to get up each Saturday to go pray for the locals, because my mind was wrapped around all the emotions that came February 7, 2006.
Not only was I struggling with going and praying for the locals in their hospital, I was struggling to go and visit/pray for our team members when they were at the private hospital in town. Flashbacks overtook me mentally, and anytime I even thought of a hospital I shut down, because all I saw was my dad.. laying there on a hospital bed.
Until God changed things up a bit and put me in the hospital bed. Our last full weekend in Uganda I spent in the hospital room with malaria and typhoid. It was the toughest weekend of the month… mentally I was terrified.. I couldn't understand why God, knowing how much I hated hospitals and what I was going through, would make sure I was there for a full weekend. Mentally I was everywhere.. Until one of the locals came into my hospital room and prayed complete healing over me.
At that time, God washed peace over the room and myself. The whole month I was struggling with the idea of hospitals, and healing, and praying for the sick, and all that… Until the tables turned and I was the one in the hospital. God used a local, to open my eyes to his faithfulness and show me why He chose my team and myself to go to the hospitals and pray. Why praying for healing is so important… and why He calls us to do such a thing.
This month God has spent a lot of time opening my eyes to the little things… and how important they actually are. I always considered praying for the sick or praying for healing to be such a little thing, until the tables were turned and I was the one who needed the healing.
So here's my challenge for my followers back home…. Take a day and look for the little things… ask God to reveal them to you… Because I have come to realize how important the little things are… and how often we take the little things for granted… when they are the things we need the most.
