Two years ago, during month 1 of my World Race, I posted a blog called This Is Not A College Course. It was about the concept of God healing people, and how there is such a disconnect between what we read in the Bible and what we practice daily. We had just had a teaching from Mark Marx, who is incredibly knowledgable about Biblical healing and has been used in amazing ways world-wide. [Side note: Mark is featured in the new documentary Holy Ghost, which is coming out next month and looks really incredible.] The whole concept of modern-day healing really messed with my beliefs, and every since, God has been challenging me in that area.
As my time on the Race went on, God continually asked myself and my team to pray for healing for people, and I did see quite a few people healed of things like malaria and knee pain and back injuries. To be honest, every time people asked me to pray for physical healing, I didn’t expect much. In my heart, I knew God could heal people, but it wasn’t easy for me to reconcile that with my mind. Despite my unbelief, God showed up, and He healed people over and over.
[In Africa with a woman the Lord healed.]
Not long after arriving in Guatemala, we had a worship night for a missions team from Oklahoma. It ended up being one of the wildest nights of prayer and worship I’ve ever experienced. When the night was over, our team was left asking ourselves, ‘what just happened?’ Adults were on their knees weeping and rededicating their lives to the Lord. He revealed Himself in such a big way to this group of people, and lives were completely altered by it.
In the midst of it, I got this annoying pain in my shin. At first, I wrote it off to being shin splints from working out, but then the Lord began to speak something to me that required a lot of faith. Your shin isn’t hurting from working out. Its to represent somebody else’s pain. Theres somebody in this room that has a pain in their shin, and you are meant to pray for healing for them. My stomach began to churn. I spent the next 20 minutes or so asking the Lord over and over if that was really why my leg was hurting. I’d never experienced anything like this before. To me, it was much easier to write off the pain as a workout injury, give it a few days to heal up on its own, and call it good. I knew, though, that God was asking me to step out in faith through this.
Finally, I gathered the courage and asked the group if anyone in the group had a pain in their left shin. Immediately, a woman standing right in front of me turned around and said that she did. I had her sit down and began to pray for the Lord to bring healing to her leg. After a few moments, she began to literally feel the Lord healing her. She said the pain had been there for a couple of weeks, and that the Lord had spoken to her about it being healed in Guatemala. Shoot! This was further proof of everything I had struggled to believe.
[The volcano we climbed.]
A couple of weeks ago, we were with another short team, hiking a volcano. We were pretty far into the hike, beginning our descent, when we stopped for a break. I overheard a guy from the short term team mention that they were having some motion sickness/vertigo issues. It caught my attention, because I have struggled with motion sickness my whole life, yet ever since arriving in this country, it has hardly been an issue. The Lord has brought a lot of healing to me personally with my motion sickness, and in that moment, I knew that I was supposed to pray for this man.
I introduced myself and told him that I felt like I was supposed to pray for his vertigo and motion sickness. It was a pretty simple prayer, and even in the midst of praying it, I wondered if the Lord was gonna show up and move. After I was done praying, the guy thanked me and I walked over to another part of the group. A few moments later, he came up to me and said that since I had prayed for him, he was feeling incredible, and wasn’t having any motion sickness issues. Yet again, despite my unbelief, God healed!
The next day, I was talking to one of my teammates and she brought up how the Lord has been using me to heal people. “You have an anointing!” she said. “God’s been using you, and you need to own it!” I know that He has been using me, and even so, I struggle to understand why. I still have a lot of the same struggles as I did two years ago, reconciling this whole idea of the Lord healing. Its so beyond my human understanding, and yet the Lord keeps calling upon me to step out and trust that He is going to move.
I don’t get it. I don’t understand. And I think its okay. I don’t think I’m really supposed to get it. I’m just supposed to trust. You’re just supposed to trust. If we believe God is sovereign, that nothing is impossible for Him, then there are probably some areas of our lives, areas of our beliefs, that we need to stop fighting and start trusting. I’m right there with you, learning to trust.
[A fun, completely unrelated picture of Henry, Kris and I wearing baby bibs.]
