On October 31st a group of racers and Ciudad Refugio workers pulled up in a van and the streets are filled with people. These people are dirty and grimy. I look around and my heart breaks. Everywhere I look there are drugs. Who are all of these people? How did they get here?
We step out of the van and I am filled with a mixture of fear and sorrow. I immediately begin praying. This place is very dark. I can physically see the spiritual warfare going on around me. I have never seen anything like this before. For the first time in my life I feel like my eyes are being truly opened.
I begin to walk the street with one of our squad leaders. I am not sure what I am supposed to do. I look around and all I see is brokenness. I try not to cry. We begin to pray aloud as we walk through the crowded street. We are praying against sin and darkness. We are praying against captivity.
The people on these streets are physically “free,” yet I have never seen so much captivity. They are held captive to drugs. They are held captive to darkness. I looked into so many eyes and my heart broke at what I saw. I saw people who are so lost. I saw people who are hurting. I saw people in desperate need of a Savior.
As we are about to get back in the van, I meet eyes with one woman. She looks distraught and seems to be crying. I feel compelled to say hello. I ask her what her name is and she says Viviana. I tell her that God loves her. She comes up to me and hugs me. A small group of people I am with ask if we can pray over her. We all surround her and I begin praying over her as I look straight into her eyes. As I am praying over her, her eyes become widened and she seems terrified. In that moment I felt as if the Holy Spirit was doing something inside of her and I think she felt it too. She immediately says she has to go and she hurries away. We continue praying for her after she left
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After we finished praying I felt a heaviness that I have never felt before. I felt like my heart was breaking. I couldn’t hold back my tears any longer. I stood in the middle of the street and wept. I wept for God’s lost children. I wept because I wanted every person that night to open their eyes and experience true freedom from their captivity.
I have prayed many times for God to break my heart for what breaks His. That night in the broken streets of Medellín, Colombia was one of the first times I felt the deep, intense pain God feels for His children. However, I know that my sorrow in no way even compares to the immense sorrow God feels for us. My eyes were opened to how lost and broken so many people in this world are. There are billions of people held captive who need to be freed.
The workers of Ciudad Refugio go out to that same street every week and see those people. They go to the same place to hand out bread and water and pray over the lost and broken people. I got to witness what it truly means to be the hands and feet of Jesus in a world full of broken people and I want more.
