Jesus can do the impossible. God heals. Abba draws people to himself through miracles. The same power that raised Jesus from the dead lives in me. There is power in the name of Jesus.
I have said all of those statements. But this month God challenged me by showing me that my actions and attitudes didn't line up with what I was proclaiming.
As we were walking around the village one person came up to us asking us to pray. One person turned into three and before you knew it we had prayed for 20 people.
Requests ranged from "my exams, my head, my kidney, my arm, my daughter who can't find a husband, my daughter in law who can't have children, my baby that it would be a boy, to I can't find work."
After a while I felt like the foreigners that were pushing around an ice cream truck full of Jesus. Come and tell us what you want and Jesus will give it to you.
There were even a few times that people around us were audibly praying to other gods. I was so frustrated! I felt like they were praying to every god and were just hoping that one of them would grant their wishes. They didn't even understand what we were saying.
That night I remember praying, "God I want them to know you, but not just so they can get what they want."
The next evening we were going to lead a worship service outside some huts when I was walking down the road with no rocks minding my own business, not talking, or taking pictures or anything. Just walking. And then I rolled my ankle. Anyone who knows me at all knows that I am a natural clutz and that one specific way I asked people to pray was that my clumsiness wouldn't get in the way of being on the race.
The second it happened I was almost crippled with fear. Almost a year to the day I tore ligaments in this same ankle while hiking. My ankle felt the same pain that I felt a year prior, and the result last year was 6 weeks in a cast.
I wanted to scream, I wanted to cry, I wanted to shake my fists at God and yell, "NO! I AM NOT LEAVING THIS RACE."
My team mates saw what happened and they prayed for me as I hobbled down the road to worship. When I got to worship I was so focused on the pain and fear that I just prayed . Then I felt this strong urge to look up at the sky because it was nighttime and the stars had just begun to come out. As I did that and began to sing praise to Abba I felt this floodgate of peace open. Then He spoke.
Abba told me that He allowed this to happen so that I could fully experience His power to heal physically.
See, God has healed me emotionally many times; therefore I have no problem proclaiming to others that God can heal emotional scars. But because I had never experienced the feeling of physical healing I couldn't proclaim it with the same boldness and tenacity.
God healed me that night. But more importantly he took my faith- much like a mustard seed and grew it exponentially.
"…Because you have so little faith. I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there' and it will move. nothing will be impossible for you." – Matthew 17:20
Now I pray expectant on God to move. Not always in the way we hope for, but in a way that brings him honor and praise.
I now understand that He uses many different methods to draw people to himself, and it is not my place to question the way in which He calls. My responsibility is to make disciples, to teach them everything He has taught me- and that process can't begin until His Spirit draws them in.
He draws, I teach. Sounds pretty simple right? I simply teach others what He is teaching me, and last week He taught me that He has the power to heal!
What is it that He is teaching you? In what new ways is He asking you to trust Him? Give Him your faith of a mustard seed and watch and see what He can do with it!
