The World Race is a wonderful opportunity to really live like Jesus, but I don’t think a lot of people really realize what this means. Yes, we do good things for people, we help them spread the Gospel, we help them build schools, we love on them, but I never really realized how Jesus must have felt a lot of the time, until I went to India.
We can read in the Gospels the story of the woman who was healed simply by touching Jesus’ cloak. It says that during this time He was being crowded by people who were all pressing up against Him, but He knew that she had touched Him because He felt the power go out of Him, which healed her. He made sure to call the woman out so that she would know that it was not His cloak that healed her. It didn’t have some sort of magical powers. He made sure she knew that it was her faith in Him that caused her healing, and nothing more than that.
Let me pause here to tell you a little bit about what it was like to be a white person in Southern India. You stand out. A lot. People stare at you. A lot. It’s kind of like being a celebrity…or a zoo animal, depending on which way you look at it. People want to talk to you, they want to shake your hand, they wave, they want to take your picture, sometimes they want your autograph, they do double-takes when you pass by them, they tap their friends and point at you, they feed you, they stare. They stare at you, whether you’re sitting at the front of their church, or walking through their village, or on the back of a tuk-tuk, or even relaxing in the place where you live. People come and crowd around you, and a lot of the time, all they do is stare. And that’s when you start to feel a bit like a zoo animal.
We prayed for people a lot in India, but sometimes it felt like people only wanted us to pray for them because we were white. Like we had some special connection with Jesus. Like they could be healed just because we prayed for them. We often felt frustrated as a team because we would begin to wonder if the people really understood why we were there.
Then I realized how Jesus must have felt. So many people saw Him as a miracle-worker and wanted Him to heal them, but that’s not what He wanted. Obviously, He did want to heal them, but that’s now how He wanted to be seen. He wanted people to listen to Him so that they could be healed spiritually as well.
In one way, India really opened my eyes to what it’s really like to “live like Jesus”, and in another way it was kind of a reminder. A reminder of what faith can do. I prayed for so many people in India, and I wanted so badly to see how God could work, but I never saw any healings (at least not to my knowledge). I’m beginning to wonder if it could be contributed to my own lack of faith.
When you come on the World Race, they talk a lot about how we, as humans, tend to put God in this box, and by doing so, we limit ourselves to what we really think God can do. We know about what He can do, we’ve read plenty of things about it, but when we don’t see it, it’s hard to actually have faith that it can happen. We serve a big God. We know that. And really, there’s no limit to what He can do, but we have a tendency to not see how big He really is due to our lack of faith.
So, I challenge you, just like I’m challenging myself. It’s through our faith that we are healed. It’s through faith that we can really live like Jesus (heal the sick, raise the dead, an all that jazz). It’s through faith that we are saved. Have faith! Let God out of the box!
