A week ago I posted an Instagram picture and a description about physical healing amongst a lot of my squadmates including myself. I’m sure you are curious to hear the details! So I figured I’d spend some time sharing with you in this blog!
On August 13th, it was another night of sermon and training. The topic was about Empowerment by guest speaker Deon Vanstaden. He explained that it is important to be in the presence of God. That if you do, God will do miraculous things in your life. This was something we all experienced as we were spending a good several days focused on God and our relationship with him.
God wanted us to all have our own voice. He never wanted us to be an echo for His works. What Deon meant by that is it isn’t enough for us to just tell stories or other people’s experiences, God wanted us to have our own stories. Our own experiences of God’s power and works, so we can tell others first hand what we saw!
Deon told us one story about how he went to speak at a women’s retreat in Africa. While he was giving his sermon, the Holy Spirit told him to say ‘Banana Spider’. This made no sense to him, so at first he brushed it off, and then the Holy Spirit said it again. So in the midst of the sermon, he stopped and told the group that the Holy Spirit wants me to say ‘Banana Spider’. A girl down the row just bursted out crying. After the sermon, her and her mom came up to Deon asking if he wanted to know what happened. And of course Deon wanted to know! He didn’t know what was going on!
It turns out that this daughter of hers strayed away from God and started pursuing worldly things and lost her faith. Her mom asked her to come to this women’s retreat just this once. The daughter finally agreed to go, but said if God is a real God, let him say our code word. That word was ‘Banana Spider’.
Deon wanted to explain that God’s character is very predictable. We can trust that God is good, that he keeps his promises he has said in the Bible, and that we can trust in Him. But his actions are unpredictable. We will always be pleasantly surprised in the way he works in our lives! So we are called to only be obedient to the voice of the Holy Spirit, and when we do, God will do his works!
Deon being a man of faith and a missionary for many years could share with us many more stories about his healing and experience (which he did share a few, ask me in person cause it’ll be too much to write!) but he wanted us to see for it ourselves.
To sum it up, Deon said:
The Price for God’s presence is Time.
The Purpose of God’s presence is Change.
The Product of God’s presence is Power.
It takes us the price of time to experiences God’s power!
So to show us this, he asked the crowd who has chronic migraine. One woman got up to the front and said her migraine was at a 6 from a scale to 1 – 10. Another said hers was a 7. So Deon prayed over her once, her migraine pain came down to a 3. Then he prayed over her a second time, and asked her what her pain level was. She buried her face in her hands and started crying. For the first time in 7 years, this woman was free from chronic migraines!
Deon wanted to make an example that it was not him who had the power to heal but God himself. So he got her to pray for the other woman’s migraine. And sure enough she was healed too! We didn’t stop there. He asked everyone who was experiencing physical pain to raise their hands and for the other teammates to come and pray for them.
I raised my hand because beginning of the summer, I had a lot of pain in my knee from running, and when I did the 20+ km hike, the pain came back. Maggie turned around and prayed for my knee, and instantly the pain was gone! I was able to jump around and move my knee with absolutely no pain!
So we went over to Sarah, where Daniel was praying for her back. She suffered from a long term spine injury where one of her vertebrae were pushed to the right. We prayed and asked her what her pain level was, it didn’t change. So we did it again, and again, and again. As more people came to lay their hands on her and prayed, she started to feel change. My hand which was on her back, she felt as if we were putting more pressure on it, but we were not. She felt her spine stretching up and straightening itself as we prayed, and in a few minutes, she was completely healed! I asked her the day we left training camp how her back was, and she said it was still great!
Maggie also had back pains, which we prayed over her and got healing. (The one in the instagram photo).
Courtney who sprained her ankle also found healing that night. But after doing the hike challenge of 2.2 miles under 38 minutes with all our heavy backpacks, she rolled it on her very last finish line, which left her in crutches for the rest of training camp. What was miraculous was even though her faith was weakened by the prayer of healing, Daniel who in passing just did a quick prayer for her on our last night of training camp and she was completely healed again! It was funny because she ran up to me and said “Wes! Notice anything different?!?” I saw she wasn’t using her crutches and was putting all her weight on her ankle!! Watch this video of her explaining her healing:
There were several others who also found physical healing that night but these are the few I could share that I witnessed with my own eyes.
The key to all of this is to walk with God and really be in his presence. To have faith and listen to his voice even if it doesn’t make sense to you in the moment. I’m looking forward to growing closer to God and experiencing His works more and more as we prepare to go out to foreign countries for 11 months and be led by the Holy Spirit on what to do next!
