Jesus did some crazy cool stuff two days ago! It was so awesome to be learning about spiritual authority in the Holy Spirit through a bible study and a teaching All in one week. But the best part was actually putting it into practice and seeing the Lord come through! My team and I were in our village, and we were heading back to our normal spot in the oak groves to pray and ask the Lord where he wanted us to go. As we were walking through Los Encinos, we passed by one of our best friend’s house, Rosa. (We make tortillas with her very often.) We asked her how she was and she didn’t respond with the typical “bien” like every other day, she told us how she was truly do. She began explaining how she had this awful pain in her stomach.
Rosa shared with us that yesterday she was in the market when an overwhelming pain over toke her stomach. It was so bad that she she was lying in the street. Everyone simply passed her by because they thought she was drunk. (Here in Guatamala when you drink alcohol, you typically solely drink to get drunk. People who are drunk typically end up laying in the street in the evening and night.) She lay there in great pain asking for help when her sister came and found her. She went to the hospital and our sweet Rosa stayed the night. They thought that it may be a mass in her stomach. She came home this morning and was on her knees praying to our Savior, asking if he would heal her. She told us how she didn’t have the money to pay for tests and certainly not for the possible surgery that the doctors mentioned to her. She humbly was on her knees talking to our father. But the pain continued.
She told us all of this, and we got the awesome opportunity to call on Papa and ask him to heal his daughter, Rosa. We prayed once, laying hands on her stomach and begging Papa to heal our friend.
Nothing happened.
She thanked us for praying, but said that she felt exactly the same, still in excoriating pain. One of our leaders, Junior, shared the story found in REFERENCE when Jesus prayed twice for the sick. He mentioned how he believed that Jesus didnt HAVE to pray twice in order to heal because he is God he is all authority on Heaven and Earth. But Junior explained that he believes it is an example for us to follow that we can certainly pray more than once! God never says if you pray once and nothing happens stop praying. In fact he actually says “pray without ceasing”. So we prayed again. Once again laying hands on Rosa pleading with Papa that if it was his will for Rosa to be healed in this moment that he would do so.
We opened our eyes looked up at Rosa and with a big smile she said in Spanish “it’s gone”.
Her pain fled!
O praise Papa for how good and faithful he is! She shared with us that she thought she was going to get healed today, and look at that, Jesus came through, as per usual! What a blessing it is to be used by Father, to further his kingdom! This healing started an awesome conversation about God’s faithfulness and we just got to bond over the magnificent character of God with this joyous lady that Jesus calls “lovely”. Rosa shared that she was excited to go to the doctor and she truly believes that the mass is completely gone!
This was fairly new for me. I’ve seen a couple people healed before, but not quite like this. It was so cool that Jesus reveled to me that the reason he heals physical aliments is so his name is glorified and because he ultimately wants to heal our spiritual aliments: our broken hearts!!! (Obviously I don’t understand all of Abba’s reasoning, but I do completely trust what he has taught.) He heals so that people begin to talk about him, so he can restore our broken bodies that he created to be perfect, he heals so that the story of his love can be shared. (You know, the one where we were so messed up in sin, that we deserved hell because he couldn’t be around us. But he loved us so much that he sent his son to die in our place and overcome death so that we can now live eternally with him! Yeah, that story). He loves when that CRAZY, AWESOME, LIFE-ALTERING news is shared with the people he created! (side note: I also do believe that there is so much growth and value in suffering, and just because Papa doesn’t heal when we want him to doesn’t mean that the blame falls on us for not having enough faith, or that the person that wasn’t healed is a “bad person”. It simply means that he is still Soverign, and his will is better than ours. But that’s a whole topic for another time.)
Abba healed Rosa so that his name could be glorified and we would all be encouraged in our faith. He asks us to step out in faith and glorify his name, to know him and make him known. It all starts with our own relationship with and then spreads to every area of our lives, every relationship in our lives! All glory to Jesus for his kindness, goodness, and faithfulness!!!
