This month in India has been absolutely crazy. As I mentioned in my last blog, my team is going to a different village each day praying for people house to house and preaching in their church meetings each night. I talked before about the preaching aspect of ministry. I told y'all how God has been destroying my comfort zone in that area and the Holy Spirit has been showing up and speaking through each of us. In this blog I would like to go more into the prayer aspect of our ministry and how the Holy Spirit has been working through us without us even knowing it.
Praying was something I was very excited about when we started our ministry this month. I love asking God to show up and seeing Him work. I expected this month to be one healing, one miracle, and one salvation after another. God called us here after all to pray for these people. I was confident that He was going to just blow our minds all month long. I was wrong about that. For weeks we prayed day in and day out in the blistering heat and we saw almost no fruit. We cast out one demon on our second day of ministry, but our translators and pastors were hurrying us along so much that we weren't even sure if the woman was freed. Our entire team started to get discouraged and became discontent. We really started wondering if we were doing any good at all in India.
Earlier this week God changed our additudes. On Thursday we went to a village and headed out to pray like we usually do. Our translators split us up in two groups with only like fifteen houses to hit for each group. We thought it would be a quick afternoon. It wasn't. Almost as soon as we hit the streets and started praying, people from the village were coming out into the street to see what was going on. By the time we finished the second house, the streets were packed and people (both believers and nonbelievers) started begging us to pray for them. We couldn't even walk down the street. It reminded us of the day Jesus was walking through the crowd and the woman touched His robe and was healed. I prayed for a man who was paralyzed from the waste down and his legs started shaking. There is no way to know how many people we prayed for between the houses we visited, but it was a lot. We still didn't see anyone miraculously healed, but I know I was starting to feel better about it.
That night we preached at the church as usual. After we preach, we do prayer ministry for people in the church. We usually just end up praying for the same people we already prayed for during our door to door prayer ministry. While we were praying, a man brought his wife in. He said that she was possessed by a demon and asked if the whole team would pray for her. He said that sometimes she would go three to four weeks without eating any food or drinking anything. Of course we said we would. Our squad leader Bethany was with us and she suggested that the whole team gather around the woman and pray for the Holy Spirit to come, while one of us directed the demon and cast it out. I was asked to speak to the demon, so I did that while my team read bible verses, sang worship songs, and prayed in tongues around me. The demon fought, it played dead, and at one point it even begged us to stop. Eventually, it let go and the woman was free. It was a beautiful moment. We finally had something tangible that we could use to encourage ourselves that we weren't wasting our time this month.
The next morning we were invited to attend a pastors conference in the ICM building where we are staying. Both my team and the other team that is spending this month ministering to the church plants in the villages were there. None of us had any idea what to expect. It turns out that they brought us there to honor us for visiting their villages this month. We were brought to the front of the room and given flowered leis. Then they sat us down in chairs and the pastors from the villages that we had ministered to so far came up and gave testimony of all of the healings that had happened and all of the people who had started coming to their churches as a result of our prayers. We were blown away. All that time we had thought that we weren't doing any good here and come to find out God was answering our prayers even though we weren't seeing it.
Since Friday morning we have been in better spirits about ministry. We know now that God really has been using us. To top it all off, we got a call this morning from one of the ICM directors. Apparently after we cast out that demon in the village Thursday night, five people accepted Christ. We have been invited back to that village on Tuesday and they want us to baptize these five people. When Jesus ascended into heaven, He left us the Holy Spirit. The same Spirit that rose Jesus from the dead is living inside of us. Jesus says in John's gospel that we as His followers will do the same things He did and greater. He is now sitting at the right hand of the Father. While He is away, we as believers have been called to use that Spirit and literally be Jesus to this broken world. We are called to love the broken and share the gospel. When He walked the earth, The first thing Jesus would do was heal the sick, cast out demons, and work miracles before he ever preached a word. I'm starting to realize that if that approach to evangelism was good enough for Jesus, maybe it is what we are all called to as well. Thank you for taking the time to read my blog. Love Y'all!!!
