The words hit me like a punch to the gut. I could feel the rebellion rising up in my spirit. It was everything I could do not to turn and run in the opposite direction down that dark dirt road.
“You have to keep taking your medications, Rachel”.
The vast African canopy of stars that had just moments before felt like freedom, now felt like a heavy trap.
Not two weeks ago I had answered God’s question, “Why don’t you ask Me to heal you?” with a, completely unlike myself, excited and expectant yes. It had taken me so much and so long to get to this place with God.
In my excitement and devotion, I decided to take an even further step of faith, to meet God halfway per say. I believed God so much for my healing and for His provision, that I would stop taking my Cystic Fibrosis medications. He gave me a peace about my decision.
Since a child I have had big faith. I love reading about Christian heroes and their acts of faith. It’s a gift I believe God has given me. So, the decision to stop taking my medications was actually easier than asking God for my own healing in the first place.
My teammate tried to meet my gaze as I stared blankly into the dimly lit red dirt road.
She had good reasons- for your health and safety, so you don’t have to go home early, what if you get sick and then someone has to stay in the hospital with you and they can’t do ministry because you’re sick, there is faith but there is also wisdom.
I could hardly hear any of it though, above my own rising hurt and rebellious heart coming back to life.
I had shared my decision with my team in intense vulnerability. And now I was being told that the leadership team had been made aware of it without my knowledge and beyond that, it felt as if they had decided that my decision wasn’t “allowed”. I felt utterly exposed, vulnerable, and helpless. Trapped.
It was a feeling that I had known well, but hadn’t felt in years.
I nodded along with the conversation long enough until we had come back to our home for the month. She gave me a half smile, trying her hardest to fight for me. I knew she was just the messenger, but the hurt was still the same. And I felt like I was drowning in it.
“I’m gonna go for a walk”.
That’s all I could manage to say to her.
Against her better judgment she said okay, but not before picking up a sharp, broken piece of tile from the driveway and demanding that I take it for protection. This elicited an unwilling laugh but it was out before I could protest.
It was near to midnight and we were in the heart of West Africa. Her reservations were valid, but my desire to be far away from everything and everyone was all-consuming.
I had managed to quell the tidal wave of emotions rising and crashing in my soul well enough during our conversation, but now I was alone. With nobody around to see me break. No one around to see me “lose it”. It was the moment I had been waiting for for the past excrutiatingly long hour.
Even in my wild storm of emotion, I could still see plain as day the cleverness of the enemy’s attack. My heart seems to have an instant reflex when it comes to rebellion. Even in the face of incredibly stupid circumstances, my heart would probably choose it if someone told me that I couldn’t. I could see the enemy twisting, right before my eyes, what God had purposed in my heart with pure intentions, to be manipulated into simply a decision made because I was being told, “No, you can’t do that”.
I walked a half mile or so down the dusty dirt road until I came to a dark place under some trees. I was hidden and out of sight. Alone. Right where I wanted to be. As I stared up into the huge black sky, I waited. Waited for the tears. Waited for the hurt to pour out of me uncontrollably in the formation of the world’s ugliest cry- I waited.
But it never came.
I sat in bewilderment under those huge African trees.
I had come here to meet God, ready to battle it out. Ready to seek His face. Ready to figure out why I was facing this. To ask Him if I had heard Him wrong. To find His wisdom. To get angry and broken all at the same time and just pour it all out at His feet.
But as soon as I was ready to let it all build, it was as if it suddenly hit an impenetrable wall and dissipated.
I couldn’t be upset. All I could feel was- peace.
After a few minutes of this confusing back and forth, I looked up into that huge black canvas of stars and asked,
“Why?? Why can’t I get upset about this? Why do I have all this emotion but have nowhere to go with it?”
“Because I’ve given you peace about it.” He so simply and tenderly replied.
It was true. When I first made my decision, I knew it was the right decision because He had given me such a peace about it. And now, here I was, in the middle of this battle that I had made so huge for myself, and yet God continued to keep His promise- to protect me with His peace.
Wow. I was in awe. What a crazy, amazing good God?? That He even cares about our sanity! To protect our minds and hearts with peace in the midst of otherwise very trivial and confusing circumstances.
I was entranced. His goodness- it was tangible. I sat there on the side of that dusty, red dirt road under the most beautiful array of stars I could dare to imagine that Ghana had ever had, and just praised and thanked Him, with the most goofy, slap-happy grin on my face.
It was not seconds later that I saw out of the corner of my eye, a stray dog wandering down the road. I was in the shadows, but he noticed me right away. He stood under the only dim light on that lonely back road and began to bark at me. At first, I was momentarily worried, since this dog was now standing in between myself and my way back home, but I figured if I kept still, he would get bored and move on.
So I continued to praise the Lord.
And he continued to bark.
And bark, and bark.
Until there were half a dozen other dogs around the neighborhood barking along with him. My fingers traced over the sharp edge of the broken tile that I had been given, my mind thinking back to how just last week one of our teammates had been bitten by a stray dog here.
Soon another dog wandered by and began to join him- both standing square, pointed at me, about 30 feet away. At this point I was just plain annoyed. Here I was trying to worship the Lord, and I couldn’t get a word out edgewise without these dogs butting in! It had easily been over 10 minutes of this unending and incessant barking. There was no sign of them stopping and in fact, they were just getting louder and more aggressive.
In a moment of complete annoyance, before I even had put the thought together fully, I swiveled my head around from starring into the sky, to looking at them directly and very calmly but firmly said,
“In the name of Jesus, leave.”
There was such a steadiness to the sentence I had just spoken that I knew was not my own.
An authority.
As the Lord as my witness, within the following ten seconds after speaking these words, these two dogs both stopped barking, sat down, looked around for a second, and then both promptly turned and trotted off side by side down the road, completely silent. Not one peep out of either of them.
My jaw was literally on the ground. My eyes were so wide they hurt as I watched these dogs silently disappear into the African night. I waited a few seconds to see perhaps if there were a car or motorcycle coming down the road that had spooked them maybe? Which still wouldn’t explain why they had so calmly pranced away. But, nothing. Complete silence.
Complete peace.
My mouth was probably catching bugs at this point by how long it had been open so wide. I was in complete and utter disbelief! That same goofy, slap-happy grin started to creep up my face once more.
Not only had God kept His promises to me, but I also had authority in His Son’s name! What the enemy meant for fear and distraction, God meant to display His power.
Darkness has absolutely NO power over light.
“Then He called His twelve disciples together and gave them power and authority over all devils, and to cure diseases. And He sent them to preach the kingdom of God, and to heal the sick.”
Luke 9:1-2
“Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you. Notwithstanding in this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you; but rather rejoice, because your names are written in the heaven.”
Luke 10:19-20
“O death, where is thy sting?
O grave, where is thy victory?
The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law.
But thanks be to God,
which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
1 Corinthians 15:55-57
I walked home that early, early morning in Northern Ghana, a little taller- like a girl might walk around school with her big brother protecting her. And peaceful. Oh, so peaceful.
“And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.”
Philippians 4:7
This happened nearly 4 months ago now on a completely different continent, and as I sit here typing this out on an island off the coast of Malaysia, I am still in that season of asking the Lord for healing and figuring out what that looks like daily. On the one hand I know that there is nothing that I could do to earn or lose healing from the Lord, it’s something that He gives according to His divine will and grace. But I also know that He honors and blesses faith and faith without works is dead.
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. But without faith it is impossible to please Him: for He that cometh to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him.”
Hebrews 11:1,6
“Through faith also Sara herself received strength to conceive see, and was delivered of a child when she was past age, because she judged Him faithful who had promised.“
Hebrews 11:11
I, Rachel Hargreaves, judge that my God, who has promised, is faithful.
“I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and He shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the Lord.”
Psalm 27:13-14
Faith and Grace from Malaysia
