As we travel through the second half of Mexico, I can’t deny God’s power or faithfulness. I’ve never seen Him working like this before, and I’m so excited to share stories of His love with others. It’s crazy, because the less my team plans and controls, the more God steps in.
In most of the Western world, we are taught how to “do church.” We have eighteen and a half minutes allotted for worship, three minutes for announcements, four for collecting the offering, and then a perfectly planned sermon that has been prepared for hours and hours. But on the Iris Latin American team, “church” looks very different. We don’t plan a ton; we just do what Jesus did. The Bible never mentions anything about Jesus preparing a sermon for twenty hours or auditioning people to be part of His worship band. He simply does three things—preaches the good news, heals the sick, and drives out demons. So His model is what we follow on our team…which is craziness for a group of people who grew up in the Western church. But guess what? It’s working. It’s working! It’s woooooorking! We go as a team into the darkest places—slums, isolated villages, and garbage dumps—and we do the three things that Jesus did. We share testimonies and the good news of Jesus’ love, and then we call the sick forward. We pray for people, and they often get healed physically. And sometimes we have to pray for deliverance, and people are freed from spiritual and emotional problems. We don’t go in with an agenda or timeframe or anything like that. We simply imitate Jesus’ ministry, and God does the rest.
Here are two of my favorite stories from the past week or so:
One evening we drove into the slums of Guadalajara to minister to the people there. We walked down the street, greeting people and playing with the children. A bunch of us congregated in one area and asked if there were any sick people who needed healing. A woman came forward whose face had become paralyzed. She couldn’t really speak because of the paralysis. Several of us laid hands on her, and the paralysis left her face! She said her face was hot, and she began to speak! She was so happy that she invited a few of us to go back to her home and pray some more with her. Two of my teammates, a bilingual woman from the local church, and I went to her house and continued to pray. I felt the Lord speaking into my heart the story of the woman who had been bleeding for twelve years and told herself that if she even touched the cloak of Jesus that she could be healed. As she reached for him in a large crowd, Jesus called her out in front of everyone and said, “Daughter, your faith has made you well.” I shared the story with the woman and told her I believed that her faith in the Lord had made her well. The four of us prayed a bit more, and the woman began to cry. She said that she felt like something was being cleansed inside her mouth, and she felt something she couldn’t explain. She said she felt so much joy and so much happiness. And as I watched this beautiful elderly Mixteco woman rejoicing in her healing and her new NOT paralyzed face, I felt incredible joy as well.
A couple nights later, our group was invited to run a church service at an outdoor street church. Again, we planned very little and just worshipped, shared God’s goodness, and prayed for people who needed healing and deliverance. I started to pray for a woman with my friend Rose. The woman was complaining of pain in her chest and stomach. We prayed for release from physical pain, but nothing happened. Maria, a bilingual woman on my team, came over to translate and found out more information. The woman had gone to the doctor, and the doctor said there was a problem with her appendix. We continued to pray for physical healing, but still nothing happened. I got a weird feeling that there was some emotional pain that was binding the woman. I haven’t had many words of knowledge like this before, so I wasn’t sure if this strange feeling was from God or from myself. But as I kept praying, the feeling persisted. I finally decided to speak up and explain to Maria what I was feeling. “Maria, I don’t know how to say this in a way that isn’t rude or accusatory,” I explained. “But I really feel like there is some emotion pain this women needs healing from. I think it’s manifesting in the physical, and that physical pain won’t go away until we deal with whatever the emotional pain is.”
Maria immediately nodded and responded, “I was feeling the same exact thing, but I wasn’t sure if I should speak up. I think what we are feeling is right.”
“Yeah, something weird is definitely going on here,” Rose now chimed in. “As we prayed for her, I started to feel a bad pain in my stomach.”
We agreed that we needed to take the risk of offending the woman by asking what was going on in her emotional life. As Maria spoke to her, the woman began to break down. As she cried, Maria translated for us and explained that the woman had a bad relationship with her husband. She got no pleasure out of having sex with him, and she only slept with him out of obligation. She was unhappy in her marriage and wrestling with depression. As Maria continued to minister to her, more bits of her story were revealed. The woman admitted that she’d also been abused by her father and had been emotionally scarred by his actions. Maria explained to the woman that forgiving her father and husband was the key to emotional freedom. We prayed for the woman to be free from the sins of her father and husband, to be released from the chains of depression, and to enter full emotional, spiritual, and physical healing. As we prayed, the woman said that the pain started to leave her body. Rose said that strange pain she’d felt in her stomach also disappeared.
After we prayed a bit more, our team leader spoke in front of the whole church about receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit. He told everyone that they could receive the gift of tongues, healing, and the ability to prophesy. When Jesus left the earth, he told his disciples they would be do even greater things than he did, because they would walk in the power of the Holy Spirit. The woman said she wanted to receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Maria, Rose, and I continued to pray, this time asking the Holy Spirit to fill this woman. I prayed she would feel and know the power of God’s divine peace, love, and joy. As we prayed, the woman began to speak in tongues and sway back and forth a bit. Suddenly, the power of the Holy Spirit fell on this woman—TANGIBLY—so that she actually fell backwards. Surprised, I awkwardly caught her and I left her in a chair to just be still for a while.
Later on in the evening, Maria went to check on her, and the woman looked completely different. What once had been a face of stress and depression was now a countenance of joy. The woman came up to Rose and me and gave us each a big hug, thanking us. She said all of her physical pain was completely gone! But more importantly, she felt JOYFUL and said she was ready to go home and make love to her husband! Hahaha! Amen!
I love seeing people healed. It never gets old. It’s great when someone is healed physically, but it’s soooo much better when they are healed emotionally too. When you can see in someone’s eyes that emotional scars are being healed, it’s so beautiful! I love that God shows up in random slums in Mexico, in isolated villages, and in little street churches. It’s such a wonderful display of His character and crazy radical love.
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