The past four or five months have been some of the busiest I can remember. With the help of a team, I launched a Healing Café in our local community earlier this Summer! It’s been an exciting, intense labour of love and ….hard labour! I’ll write more about the Café perhaps another day. For now, here are some snapshots of what I have witnessed Jesus do during some out-and-about encounters with people in different places and countries.
1) A man who was a “seeker” was in a worship gathering I had just attended. He had chronic back issues from several accidents he’d been in over the years. I’ll call him Thomas. Despite many, many sessions with chiropractors and physiotherapists, Thomas had still not been freed of his pain. He was told that one of his legs was shorter than the other. When I ventured to Thomas at the end of the gathering that Jesus could easily grow out his legs to equal length, he was sceptical to say the least! But he was willing to be prayed for in this regard. Here are the before and after picures of what took place during that prayer. The prayer only lasted a couple of moments and I had to tell the leg to “STOP!” growing in the end, in case it overshot the previously longer leg!! The first photo shows the discrepancy between the leg lengths (the heels and the line around the shoe base clearly shows this) The second photo shows the finished product Jesus style!
Two Treasures of Turkey.
Two highlights stand out to me from a short trip to Turkey in May. Both concern separate hotel staff members in two different hotels..
In the first one, a very helpful member of staff with S E Asian background caught my attention and I asked Jesus for a prophetic word of insight for her. I sensed he told me some things to do with her name. Her name means “second born” – and the word was about how God never saw her as “second” in terms of her uniqueness, her importance or her place in His affection. She was “first and only” to the Heavenly Father, not just an afterthought or second best.
There was some more in the word about the female line in her family and the exceptional closeness of the female bonds between strong, powerful women down her maternal line. This dear lady nodded with tears in her eyes as I spoke these things to her. The words were landing in tender places and she received them. It was a wonderful opportunity to speak to her of the intimate knowledge that Jesus has of us, and His ability to speak to hearts today -even through a stranger He sends our way to communicate Himself to us.
The second word was in a different part of Turkey and a hotel staff member – also from a SE Asian background. I’ll call her Maddie. As she was helping me with something, I asked Holy Spirit about her. I felt Him tell me that Maddie had been cheated out of money by someone she had trusted in the past and it was still an unresolved issue that Jesus wanted to heal in her, through her releasing forgiveness. He could easily make up the missing amount of money for her – and even more!
When I explained to Maddie how I had just been asking God about her and told her this word, she was so surprised and told me she had chills and goosebumps all down her body – she knew this word was from God!
This led into a whole conversation not just about forgiveness but about Jesus, the ultimate Forgiving One I told her my own testimony of being forgiven and coming to receive jesus for myself and she was drinking this in, even understanding that it was like being “born all over again”. This lady was not a Christian and came from a cultural background of a very different faith. But she explained how whenever she came across people online or in person who were singing or talking about Jesus, this amazing peace would come over her whole person!
Maddie had also found herself watching YouTube videos about people of other faiths who had turned to Christ and how their lives had changed so beautifully and powerfully. She was feeling that same feeling in the room now as we were talking together! It was the most beautiful encounter that I merely stepped into through the Holy Spirit’s invitation.
I was leaving Turkey the next day, but wrote Maddie a note with some online resources she could access that explained more about Jesus and the amazing salvation He has freely won for us – for her – so that she can be forever in close, loving relationship with Him.
Thank you for pursuing these two precious treasures, dear Holy Spirit, until they cannot wait to give their wholehearted “YES!” to Jesus.