Hello again dear Readers,

I’ve missed you!  My time has recently been taken up with helping at training events, now it’s good to be back at the keyboard.

Here’s a recent marketplace happening that I found quite comical!

Waiting in the queue for the self-checkout tills in a busy supermarket, I noticed the lady just in front of me put her bags down with a groan and a grimace.  “Heavy bags you’ve got there?” I questioned her.  “Yes, but my back is the real issue” she replied. “I’ve got a prolapsed disc and carrying this lot has not done it any favours.  I shouldn’t really have come shopping at all.”

The shoppers were being hustled through as fast as each till became vacant, so I knew I only had a brief window of time.  Explaining to this lady – Alison – about praying for people in pain and seeing God take their pain away, Alison agreed to let me pray for her back, scaling her current pain at 8/10.  The pain meant she couldn’t stand up fully and it also radiated down her leg at times.

I laid hands on the general area of her back and began to command the pain to go and the disc to move back to its correct position.  My hand must only have been there for 15 seconds when Alison announced “Oh, I can feel that!  It’s really warm, and the pain is less!”  

“Warm and less is good!” I encouraged her. 

Just then, Alison was called forward to a vacant checkout right at the far end.  I knew the encounter wasn’t finished so I just blurted out “I’m coming with you!” and I followed Alison at pace all the way down to her checkout point!  Dumping my own shopping bags down, I continued to release healing to Alison’s back while she was scanning her items through!  When I invited her to check herself out, Alison reported “Well, I can stand up straight now.  That’s something I certainly couldn’t have done before!” 

Her pain level had gone down to a 3 or 4 and she reported feeling relaxed (a miracle in itself, given the frantic nature of that store checkout!!).  The pain was going down slowly in small increments, more slowly than I would have expected.  It was then that Alison said “I don’t really want all the pain to go because I’m going from here to a physio appointment and they need to see how badly the disc issue affects me”!  Ahhh..That explained a lot.

I did try to suggest that being pain free after Jesus heals you in just moments is far preferable to needing lots of time-consuming physio sessions but I had to respect Alison’s decision and allow her to go semi-healed.   I do believe that Alison could have had her full healing that day, but her belief that she needed to hang on to some pain was the limiting factor.  Jesus will never force us to move beyond our desire or will.  I assured her that full healing was available to her and that I would continue to pray for her at home.

Before leaving, Alison said “How random that I should meet you today.  I wasn’t even going to come shopping, but my son just passed his exam and I wanted to get him some special food for dinner tonight.  Thank you for praying for me, I really do feel so much better”. 

And with that, Alison left the store and I started scanning my own shopping items! 

Keep chasing down dear Alison, Holy Spirit, and lead her ever deeper into Jesus’ saving, healing Love!