I’ve been wanting to share with you more stories of what ministry looks like on the Race. The challenge is that on this eleven-month mission, every experience is interconnected with the entire rest of the journey. It’s impossible to separate just one moment and preserve its richness in isolation. So consider this a story about God, spread across five months of Race.
Bolivia, Month 2
Our whole squad was engaged in a twelve hour night of prayer. From 8 pm to 8 am, there would always be at least one person awake and praying in the sanctuary of El Puente Christian retreat camp. I planned to stay for one hour and found myself there for seven instead. I participated in a healing prayer time and witnessed squadmate after squadmate be healed from physical ailments: Kai’s incurable chikungunya and Shannon’s life-threatening nut allergy were perhaps the most awe-inspiring, but others were also healed of back pain, wrist pain and other physical problems. People found freedom in forgiveness of others and themselves. Spiritual gifts were revealed. As a squad, we stepped into the power of the Holy Spirit, and God met us that night in a profound way.
As we welcomed the dawn with a morning worship session, our squad leader Austin encouraged us to remember what had happened that night. God had started a remarkable work in that sanctuary, and we shouldn’t let it fade away. Nor should we limit God’s power to one night of prayer. “Everything that happened here tonight, you can do on your own. The same Holy Spirit who was at work here tonight lives in you. If you missed the healing prayer time, pray healing over yourself. If you have someone you didn’t forgive tonight, ask God to help you forgive.
“The work doesn’t end now. You have this power and authority.”
So walk in it.
In my mind, I was thinking, yes, God is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow, and the things He’s done through us in this special night of prayer are things we can also ask and expect Him to do all the time. That makes sense.
But in my heart, I doubted. God does incredible things, but He doesn’t do them around me except at really special times when others are also praying. So I could pray for healing anytime, but He wouldn’t do much outside of a situation like tonight.
* * *
Malawi, Month 5
I had no idea what was going on.
Our ministry hosts had driven us to a rural Malawian village, then set up a bunch of sound equipment, spread the word throughout the village, and begun a crusade. There was worship, then preaching, then more worship.
Now we were praying, but it wasn’t prayer in any form that I’d seen it before. People were lining up at the front of the room and our ministry hosts were pairing off to pray with them. Some asked for prayer for physical healing; others, for painful home situations. In the center of the room, people started shouting and falling down. “OUT! OUT!” our hosts shouted, rebuking the demonic presences plaguing them.
I stood by the wall, craning my neck around a couple of my teammates. Were we supposed to go pray as well? What in the world were we praying for?
I had no idea what was going on.
Day after day, as our hosts walked us through crusades and encouraged us to join them in preaching and prayer, I became more familiar with this style of ministry. I struggled sometimes to have faith in what I was seeing, but I knew I could trust our hosts’ love for Jesus and desire to follow Him. And I couldn’t deny that people were experiencing new freedom and power and joy as a result of the prayers we all prayed during these crazy crusades.
* * *
Zambia, Month 6
“What chapter are we on?”
“Ten, I think.”
Our team was doing a Bible study together, working our way through the book of Acts one chapter at a time. In Acts 10, Cornelius, a Roman soldier, summons the apostle Peter to come share the Good News according to the Lord’s command. When Peter arrives, Cornelius falls down at his feet in reverence. “But Peter made him get up. ‘Stand up,’ he said, ‘I am only a man myself.'” Acts 10:26
Several of us have been reading Crazy Love by Francis Chan and discussing his powerful and convicting writing and preaching. In this, I saw a present application of Acts 10: us as Cornelius, and Francis Chan and other learned Christian leaders as Peter. “We should respect our leaders, but we shouldn’t worship them,” I said. The Lord has enabled many Christian leaders to powerfully convey His truth, but still, we are all equal in the sight of God. The same Holy Spirit who lives in them also lives in us; we are all only men ourselves.
* * *
Zambia, Month 6
We pulled up to the clinic and piled out of the van. Our task: to pray over the patients. Deborah, Margot, Anna and I walked to the door.
As soon as the four of us stepped across the threshold into a ward of the clinic, a small, square room lined with beds along two walls, a commotion arose. A woman had been lying calmly on the bed nearest the door, but when we entered, she began flailing wildly, throwing her arms and legs into the air. She flung herself off the bed and onto the floor, where she continued to flail–and began to drag herself on her belly towards the door, stretching out her hands towards the threshold we’d just crossed.
We leapt back, agape. It looked for all the world like the cases we’d seen of demon possession in Malawi, especially as it had only begun when we arrived.
But we no longer had our Malawian hosts with us to explain what we were seeing, and I didn’t want to overspiritualize and jump to conclusions. As we divided into two pairs and split up to pray for patients on each side of the room, I wondered whether the woman had had a seizure.
We wandered around the room to pray for all the other patients, then returned together to the first woman. The metal bedframe had been removed and her mattress had been placed on the floor to prevent her from falling several feet again. She was seated now, watching us. When we kneeled beside her, she began to cry. “Help me,” she pleaded. “Help me, please.” We nodded, laid our hands on her and began to pray.
Seconds later, the flailing began again. Her body began to writhe and she grabbed the collar of the yellow shirt she wore, tearing a long gash down the center. She flung herself back as attendants gathered around her to pin her arms to the bed. We prayed louder, shifting our focus from physical healing to spiritual freedom. There was no longer any room for doubt–something dark was at work here.
After a few minutes, our prayers subsided and we looked at the woman again. A nurse had pinned her to the bed to calm her down, and another had drawn the torn pieces of her shirt over her chest to cover her. As we fell silent, she sat up, looking dazed and confused. She looked down at her shirt with a puzzled expression, staring at the tear and then pulling it more tightly around herself. Then she looked up at us again, her eyes full of desperation and pain and despair and hope.
Her name was Isabel, we learned. She has been receiving medical care for months for pain that won’t go away. In her poor health, she can’t get a job, or, worse in her eyes, a husband. All her siblings, even those younger than her, are now married, and she feels as though her life is wasting away as she lies in the clinic, unable to make a place for herself in society. Furthermore, she still carries the burden of a painful, abusive relationship with her father growing up. All these factors contribute to and are compounded by the spiritual oppression she was suffering under when we entered the room–for by now we were certain that her pain went far beyond the physical.
As she looked at us, I noticed with amazement that new glint of hope in her eyes. She believes we can help her, I thought. She believes that our prayers, ours specifically, can heal her in ways that nothing and no one else can. I thought again of Peter and Cornelius and wondered, did I believe that of myself? Cornelius knew nothing of Peter beyond the fact that the Lord had sent him, yet he believed absolutely in Peter’s God-given power and authority and he welcomed the apostle with honor and reverence. Did I believe, truly believe, in the power of Christ in me?
We prayed over Isabel once again in light of what we now knew, and then we asked her whether she knew Jesus. She did, she told us. She loved him, loved him with a love so deep and real that tears poured down her cheeks again as she spoke. She sang in her church and spent time in His Word, and the greatest desire of her heart was to know Him more.
“You have the same Spirit inside of you that we all have,” we told her, lifting her from the ground with our words just as Peter had reached down to pull Cornelius up from his reverent bow. “You have the same power and authority of Christ that is in each of us. You can pray over yourself, too, and God hears and responds to your prayers just as much as ours.” We then invited her to pray for herself and bowed our heads to listen to her sweet words.
And then, in the most beautiful display of Christ’s love I’ve seen in a long time, one of my teammates took the shirt off her back, stripped away Isabel’s torn yellow tee, and slipped her own shirt over the other woman’s head. With tears in her eyes, she held Isabel’s hand and told her of how very much Jesus loves her.
As the hope continued to blossom in Isabel’s eyes, we each hugged her and gave her one last smile. Then we said our goodbyes to the clinic patients and left to pile back into the van.
I don’t know the end of Isabel’s story. I don’t know exactly what was going on in that clinic and in her spirit; I don’t know exactly what healing Jesus worked in her body and in her heart through our prayers; I don’t know what freedom He brought into her life. I do trust, however, that a shift occurred in Isabel’s life that day, whether it was groundbreaking or just one tiny shuffle more towards fullness of joy in Christ.
And I know that a shift occurred in my life that day, too. When it comes to faith, I’ve always seen myself as a student, a disciple, a novice, an amateur. I’m learning from the leaders, pastors and disciple makers around me, people mature in their faith who live in the love and power of Christ. I’m Cornelius, looking up in awe at those farther along in their journeys with Jesus.
But that day, in Isabel’s eyes, I was Peter. When we walked in the door, something inside her responded to Christ’s light in us with such violence that she flew off her bed onto the floor. As we prayed our way around the room, she saw women filled with God-given power and authority lifting life-changing prayers to the One who is sovereign over all things. And as we approached her bed, she looked up to each of us–up to me–as women who were so full of the Spirit and Christ’s love that their prayers and the One they served could transform her life, too. She believed so deeply in Jesus’ power in us that she sobbed and pleaded to us as we came near, “Help me. Help me, please!”
I am “only a man myself,” as Peter tells Cornelius. Yet at the same time, I am a daughter of the King of Kings, filled with the same Holy Spirit who raised Christ from the dead, sent with God’s authority as a warrior for His Kingdom, charged in Matthew 10:8 to “heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons.” His power in me is not dependent on the presence or prayers of others. He’s not holding out on me, responding to others’ prayers but refusing to hear me when I’m the one asking Him to heal bodies and hearts. He has given me authority and power, all the power we experienced during our prayer night in Bolivia and then some, and He has asked me to pray boldly and in great faith.
That day I learned that my perceptions of myself as student are true, but they’re not the whole truth. I’m a disciple, but I’m also a disciple maker, a learner and yet also a leader. I see myself as a small child in the Christian faith, but Isabel saw me as a powerful warrior for the Lord’s Kingdom. Somehow, both views are true.
And that day, I began to believe and to walk in the authority the Lord has given me as His beloved daughter. I needn’t fear that I’m too young or inexperienced or small for God to place the power of His Spirit in me. For “Elijah was a human being, even as we are. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years. Again he prayed, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced its crops.” James 5:17-18
As Austin said after our night of prayer, “The work doesn’t end now. You have this power and authority.”
So walk in it.
My teammate Anna also wrote about this experience. Read her story here. And check out Kai’s and Shannon’s blogs to read how God healed them in Bolivia.
