Once a week
Campus Crusade for Christ has a prayer meeting at the Cape Coast University,
they invited us to come join them this past week. Before going I sort of had an
expectation of what it was going to look like and was not excited to attend. I
expected it to be an overly long and drawn out meeting in some hot cramped
building on campus. I admit to not going into it with a good attitude and have
repented from having a negative attitude towards things in the future
(especially since I had no clue as to what it would look like). Mike Sanders
and I went to campus a little early to meet up with the president of Campus
Crusade Forson. We met up at the taxi station in front of campus and walked
over to a field about 300 yards away and stopped. I looked at mike and then at
forson and asked “aren’t we going to your prayer meeting” forson responded
“yes, we do it out here”. My next thought was “that’s different”. About 5 min
later people started coming over to this field and introducing themselves to us
and welcoming us to their meeting. When it was time to start Forson began
asking us to pray for Africa, and that the enemy would lose his hold on this
continent. So we all prayed out loud, those who prayed in tongues prayed in
their prayer language, those who didn’t spoke in English or in the local
language. It was really cool and completely different than I expected. The
prayers changed to prayers for Ghana, Cape Coast, University, students, and
then us.
We had been
praying for about an hour, when a man and his son walked up behind the group
and just watched us for a while. When we were done he and his son approached us
and began speaking to the Ghanaian’s in their local language. He said that while he was walking on
campus he felt led to come over to this field and when he got here and heard us
praying he knew he had to ask us to pray for him. Realizing Mike and I were out
of the loop Forson began interpreting for us. The man was asking for prayer, he
said his life was tumbling out of control. He was bound by drunkenness and
depression and was losing his family. He said that his wife wanted a divorce
and he just didn’t know what to do anymore. He began telling us that he wanted
to be a better man for the sake of his family and especially for his son. We
were all blown away by this man’s honesty and boldness to come confess those
things to complete strangers. God instantly gave us all a heart for this man
and we began praying over him vigorously. We prayed that God will bring this
man out of darkness and into light, we asked the Lord to give him spiritual
eyes and ears so he could see that the answer to his problems is not in the
bottom of a bottle of beer but in the Lord Jesus Christ! We prayed that God
would reveal himself to this man and that his life would be forever changed
after having such an encounter.
After
praying Mike shared with the man his testimony on drunkenness and what it did
in his life and how God showed up and changed everything. We shared the perfect
Gospel of Jesus Christ with him. I felt compelled to tell him that He needs to
learn how to be a man for the sake of his child. I told him that he should seek
the Lord and find his identity and manhood in Christ. Honestly I’m sick and
tired of travelling around and coming across men who are absent or bad influences
in their child’s life. The man stood in agreement with our prayers, advice, and
promised he would do better…. I feel like he missed the point. The point we
tried to get across was that we can’t do it on our own! We have all tried that
and failed. It’s about accepting Christ, repenting from our sins, relying on
the Holy Spirit, and allowing God to be exactly that you’re God, your provider.
The coolest thing is that Christianity doesn’t stop there but that’s the basis
that we wanted him to understand. That man did not accept Christ that night, he
promised us that he would show up to the next meeting and went along his way. I
thank God for the opportunity to plant that seed, that the man has now heard
the gospel and has heard from the Lord through us. I pray that the Holy Spirit
waters that seed, whether through us or someone else. I pray that that man gets
to know the God I know and trust in.
