Yesterday I went a little crazy, I’ll admit it, I went crazy. The best part: I’m not even a little ashamed.
Two teammates and I have been talking this week about how badly we want to see a miracle, but to be honest I’m not sure that I believe that from my prayers I’ll see a broken hand mended or even a fever reduced. I know it’s in the Bible and it’s definitely possible, I just don’t always believe that I have what it takes, which is true, I don’t have what it takes, God does. But I’m not sure I have the faith to believe that He can do these things. So we have been praying for the last few days for miracles, it’s been literally written on our hands “I want to see miracles.”
Then yesterday happened. We woke up and learned that a lady we had met at the hospital earlier this week had passed away after an emergency c-section. You could feel the heaviness in the house as church members gathered to mourn. All of our pack mates had left and we were waiting to go to the hospital for another reason that ended up falling through. As the three of us sat around talking, Kelsey says, “God wants us to pray to raise her from the dead.”
This first of all was definitely a step of obedience for Kelsey; to even mention praying to raise someone from the dead is not something she expected she would ever do. This was radical faith! To believe someone could be raised from the dead. We discussed the idea for a while and then we prayed. We prayed and we read scripture and before we knew it half an hour had gone by. Then Krystle spoke up, “We need to go to where the body is, we need to pray over her.” Okay ladies, this is getting a little ridiculous…
We asked Pastor if we could go to the hospital to visit the woman and he tells us it’s too late, so we decided to try to go anyways. We walked down the hill and attempted to find the bus that would take us to the hospital. The outcome ultimately was that we didn’t make it to the hospital and the woman as far as we know is still not alive, but we did see a miracle that day.
Three cynical women decided to believe. We decided that even after a month of constant prayer in India and seeing very little actual fruit (apart from people being relieved of headaches), that our prayers weren’t empty. We decided that even though we haven’t seen any crazy miracles up to this point that God could still use us and we decided to believe in something absolutely insane to the rest of the world. So if you want to label me a “Jesus Freak” (thank you DC talk), feel free, I’m going to step out of my unbelief and decide to believe. And if nothing else, we prayed REAL prayers again. My miracle was seeing three women go from thinking their prayers were empty to believing with everything we had in us that God IS healer and can raise the dead. Our beliefs were restored. Our prayers were restored. We were restored from a place of emptiness. Sometimes the miracle you pray for isn’t exactly the miracle you get.
