The brightly colored pendants hung from the rafters in the sky blue painted church. This rectangle building with eight crosses cut into the upper walls on the longer sides was the location of a community medical camp. One in which most patients would enter into not knowing the name of Jesus or the love of the Father. We rearranged the seats to make the tiny building feel more open and the team gathered in the middle of the room, bowed our heads, and began to pray.
Inviting Holy Spirit to come into our midst and give us words and visions for the patients, we laid our own agendas down and yielded our hearts to the agenda of our Father. Some of my team and the team that just returned from the hills came together in the middle room to pray and ask Holy Spirit to move, and then we waited for people to see the doctor. A few of us started entertaining the children waiting outside for their check ups. The sun was bright and its’ rays were perfectly warm on these cool winter days in the foothills of India.
I found some tiny children and played peekaboo with them; then I went around the camp to see the babies and their mothers and pray for them. The babies were beyond precious, all wrapped up in extravagant cloths. The way that Indian women carry their babies is really something. They literally strap them to their backs with ONE piece of fabric… Somehow this is a secure baby carrier. I don’t know how they make sure they don’t slide right out, but it works – these women can do just about anything with their babies strapped on.
Each mother I asked to pray for responded differently to my request. One smiled with crooked teeth and nodded her henna-dyed head “yes.” Another simply denied me by moving her piercing gaze to her children who were misbehaving. There were a handful who had NO idea what I was asking, and I had NO idea what they were saying in response. Those were so awkward. I’m sitting there asking to pray for these mothers and babies and trying hard to follow the Lord’s often uncomfortable leading and all I get is a giggle or some dialect of Hindi of which I known nothing. This went on for a few minutes until I realized that patients were entering the blue church. I quickly walked in and saw that others from my team had already begun praying for people, so I waited patiently inside for another to arrive.
Then entered K, with his dark eyes and a noticeable limp. Another man was leading K by his arm inside the doors of the church over to a wooden bench where me and Tyler, from my squad, began ministering to him with the help of the translator. K wore a light, heather grey sweater and pants, once black, but now were a charcoal shade with dirt and dust smeared all over. His hair was jet black and the wrinkles on his face had me guessing he was in his mid to late sixties. I glanced at his doctor write-up with his name scribbled in the top left corner and read: “Leg pain. Dizziness. Eye problems.” I started calling him K because I couldn’t make out the name written I the note. We asked him a few quick questions about his health and asked if he was a Christian. K stated what was on the doctor’s note, informed us that he had lost all vision in his right eye due to cataracts and that he was not a Christian. Immediately we began asking the Lord to heal him and touch his heart. This went on for a few minutes.
My hand was on K’s head, and as I prayed for his head ache and dizziness to be gone in the name of Jesus, I felt strange movement under the palm of my hand. My hand got warm, and I asked Holy Spirit to do His thing. We finished praying and asked him how he was feeling. Through the translator, he said his leg pain, head ache, and dizziness were gone. Yes, Lord! But his eyes were still clouded with the cataracts. So, we walked K over to the eye specialist at the camp.
“He is blinded by a cataract in the right eye and the left eye is following suit. The only way he will regain his vision is by surgery.” The look on the doctor’s face was hopeless. He and I and everyone else under the eye tent knew that this sweet man wouldn’t be able to afford eye surgery. I led K by the arm out from under the tent, weaved him through the children, up the front steps of the church, through the doors and over to the bench we prayed on just a few moments before receiving this news.
Believing that our God is a God of healing, we began to pray specifically for the cataracts to be removed and for full restoration of sight. We cried out to the Lord for K’s heart. I declared that my God is a jealous God who wants the hearts of every human being. He is a God who is wooing all of Creation back to his tender loving embrace. I started singing over K words of healing and petitions for the Spirit to come over him.
As our prayers and songs quieted down, we inquired this sweet man of his sight. He still couldn’t see. A bit discouraged, I sat there and questioned God of what He was doing. “Do you not want this man’s sight restored, Father?” “You’re a good Father. Why can’t you give this man a good gift?” But Tyler pressed into K’s heart. “K, do you know that our God loves you and wants to heal you? His heart is for you. Jesus Christ came and died to give you life. He wants to be Lord of your life.” As Tyler ministered to K’s heart, he asked K if he would like to receive Jesus into his heart as his Lord and Savior. With the small, quiet, and weak voice that K mustered up, he asked Jesus to come into his life, forgive him of his sins, and lead him through the rest of his days.
Hot tears slowly streamed down my cheeks as I watched this old man say that he wanted Jesus. K looked up from praying in his own tongue, and we started telling him that Jesus wanted to make him well, but that we didn’t know what that will look like. It could mean full healing on earth or it could mean complete healing when he gets to Heaven. Either is better than neither. He looked discouraged, but we kept speaking truth into his heart. He looked at the translator and said that he wanted to have Jesus. Me and my squad mate looked at each other with smiles that said, “Didn’t we just do that?… I guess we can do it again?” And so we did. But this time he was really ready. K’s heart fully understood what happened at the Cross of Jesus!
I made sure that he got a Bible in his manuscript before he left the camp. We tabbed pages for him to begin reading in scripture. K shared with us that he gets scared every day at 4 p.m. when the sun goes down because he loses all sense of sight at that time. So, I encouraged him to read Psalm 23 every night and my squad mate encouraged him to read Psalm 91. The pastor at the church read some scripture aloud to K, and we praised God for moving in his heart.
Psalm 23:
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside still waters.
He restores my soul.
He leads me in paths of righteousness
for his name’s sake.
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff,
they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies;
you anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord
forever.
That day, January 29, the body of Christ gained a new member! That day wasn’t about the fact that K wasn’t fully healed. It wasn’t about the fact that I watched a baby walk out still having constant muscle spasms. It wasn’t about the restoration of a young boys sight. And it wasn’t about how many people walked away from the medical camp having been totally physically healed by the Lord. That day was a day that the Lord had made for K to come to Jesus.
The Lord desires to woo the heart of man more than He desires that every human be made perfect in his temporal earthly body. The Holy Spirit cares about the heart above all else. Physical healing takes second place when the health of the heart is at stake. K’s heart was most certainly at the center of the Spirit’s healing agenda for the day.
I sat amazed at the awesomeness of God. I hardly knew how to process what I had just experienced. Come to find out, K walked into that blue church as a Hindu, sat under the colorful pendants and cut out crosses in the walls, let us pray over him and give him a Bible and he walked out of there a follower of Jesus. Wild…
“But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior.” – Titus 3:4-6
