Good morning! Just thought I’d share a little about my weekend. We drove around 7 hours north on this outreach (and only about 5 hours back… that always cracks me up.) We went into the village to pray and talk with people Friday morning after breakfast. Our group prayed for several people who all got healed, and the ones who weren’t Christians got saved after they were healed.
The most notable healing we saw was a young lady lying on a bed out in front of a house. She was very weak and sick looking. We found out she had cerebral malaria, which is the kind that attacks your brain. We spent some time praying for her and she was not showing any signs of improvement. God reminded several of us all at once how Jesus and others put people out of the room when they prayed for people to be raised from the dead. There were many people crowded all around us just watching – so many that most of us couldn’t even get to her. That makes the spiritual atmosphere really difficult to pray and see breakthrough – when prayer for the sick becomes a spectator’s event. We asked our Mozambican leader to ask the people to back away except for the family. He did and we were able to actually get near her to pray for her. The crowd pressed in around us and we had to ask them to leave this time because we still weren’t seeing much improvement in her condition except her fever seemed to be lightening up a little. After most of them left we continued praying and saw instant breakthrough in her condition. She was able to sit up and drink water and she said she felt better. She bent over and poured some water over her head and the family brought her baby to her to hold him. We continued praying for her and she eventually felt like her fever was gone and actually became cool, which was amazing considering we were all out in the sun. Eventually she was up walking around easily! God is so awesome.
That afternoon we drove to another village and setup everything and did worship music / dancing. People crowded in from everywhere and joined in. We had a few men who were being rather rude in their dancing that we had to escort away. One particular guy Tim had to escort out 5 times. I was on the truck helping with sound and praying and I told Tim if he came back, next time I was going to release the fullness of the Holy Spirit on him. LOL. Sure enough I saw him making his way around the back of the truck to come back within a few minutes. He got to the corner of the truck and I jumped down right in front of him and cut him off and locked eyes with him. He just stared back at me. I put a hand on him and started praying for the glory of God and the Holy Spirit to be released on him and started praying in the Spirit and within about a minute or two of praying he was on his face crying. He got back up and eventually started speaking to us. He begged to come back with us to Iris because he was an orphan and didn’t have any family. He offered to wash dishes or wash clothes or anything if we would bring him back. The problem was he was older, probably early 20’s, and the Iris base is an orphanage for children. We eventually got him to sit down and watch the Jesus movie. I’m not sure if he got saved that night, but Tim and I had prayed with him in English that he would come to repentance and salvation and that he would be discipled by the Christians in the village. We were talking last night with some of the long-term staff after we got back about how it’s hard to know what to do for someone when you have a ten year old in a 20 year old person’s body. It’s the kind of ministry that short term missionaries just can’t do. Those are the kinds of problems we can’t fix in an evening or a week or a summer even, apart from God doing a major miracle in the person’s mind, body, and spirit, which you generally do not see or hear of except in extreme cases.
God also did a cool thing that day with the weather Friday afternoon. It was very cloudy and stormy looking, which would be bad on an outreach because we’re using generators, movie projectors, and sound equipment, and rain would put a stop to it. It started raining that afternoon as we were walking in the village praying with people and we prayed and it instantly stopped. Later on that afternoon after we had setup and started worship, some really dark clouds started heading our way. We prayed and as they approached, the clouds shifted and parted around us and then resumed course on the other side of us! No rain all night!
As I said in a previous e-mail, we fly out on Wednesday to the Zimpeto base. I am looking forward to the week there. We should have the opportunity to do ministry at the prison, hospital, and the dump in Maputo. It should be awesome..