“I have demons,” the girl told me quietly. “They do not want
me to study.” What the details of this situation were I didn’t know. All I knew
was that I had been positioned at the “individual prayer” station of this
outreach mission, and this Islamic girl was asking for that service. We waited
until some of the other members in the group who were already busy handling a
similar case had finished, and then the praying began.
(To continue reading, please click "Read More.")
How had I found myself here? It started because the medical
team that came to the guesthouse let me tag along to their workshop today, a
church with a clinic set up downstairs and stations for preaching and prayer
upstairs. While waiting in line for medical treatment, people listened to the
gospel, received prayer, and heard testimonies.
The prayer section seemed to me the most amazing: people came asking us to call upon the Lord
Himself on their behalf for jobs, for family, for provision for food and school
fees, and yes, occasionally for deliverance from oppression. In this land where
shrines, symbols and witchcraft are still prevalent among the country, people
understand the reality of a spiritual dark side.
Please pray along with
us. We don’t have it in ourselves to offer the freedom, provision and strength
these people need: all we can do is call on God. You know me! I’m not an apostle
or a televangelist or even a godly old church lady with wisdom in these things.
Please pray for words and the Holy
Spirit, and wisdom, to know how to pray and to pour ourselves out on the people
that come to the clinic. I don’t have in me what it takes to be like Jesus. He
said “apart from Me, you can do nothing,” and when He says something you can be
certain He’s not just joking around!
Now that the “prayer request” part of this post is over, to
use Christian-ese, a “praise report!” A women’s meeting went on tonight after
the clinic had been packed up, during which meeting some of us attempted a kids'
program. We broke out a bag of animal balloons, and I used one to tell the
story of Jonah and the Whale. Using Matthew 12:40 to tie in a gospel spiel, I
decided I’d regret it if I didn’t ask one question: “Is there anybody here who
isn’t born again who wants to be?” (They use the phrase “born again” quite regularly
here, although phrases like this or words like “God,” “sin,” and “saved,”
require a more serious defining of terms in Canada.) My eyes must have
physically widened at the amount of little hands that immediately shot up in
the air. They couldn’t possibly have
heard right. “Do you all know what this means?” I asked again, trying to
explain better what they were signing themselves up for. “It means you’re
asking Jesus into your life,” my teammate said. “Do you want that?”
“Yes,” they kept saying. Tonight is the first time I’ve ever
tried to “preach” something that serious, and actually doing it blew me away. The others downstairs helping spent the
remainder of the happy, hectic night keeping the growing crowd of kids under
some sort of control while the rest of us manufactured balloons as fast as we
possibly could! I especially liked teaching some of the other teammates how to
make balloon sculptures, like the “guitar.” It’s such a fun, easy skill that
opens up all sorts of doors for kids' ministry. One middle-aged guy who had been
helping out even said later of making the balloons, “I had a blast!”
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