There's no way to blog this neatly. The account below, sent to me by Emmanuel Church Durham, trips and flows from story to story of prayer, prophecy, breakthrough and rejection, courage and faith. It's kind of like journeying through the start of Acts when the disciples start rocking around in the power of the Holy Spirit seeing stuff happen as they share the love of God. Except this happened the other week in a northern uni city with every-day Jesus-following students.
It was partly triggered by praying and sharing the good news on the streets when I joined these guys for the #fusionroadtrip last year. What an encouragement! So, take a deep breath, enter the messy, risky, unlimited journey of responding to the nudges of the Holy Spirit....
Story report written by Tom:
JJ asked a woman if she had bad hips. She said that she hated God and on Facebook two weeks ago said he was a bastard. JJ started telling her how God loved her and then she started becoming more open as he and Adam prophesied over her and her daughter. She asked for more so Hannah prayed for her foot which was injured and then it got completely healed. She was very spooked out!
Hannah and Rachel also spoke to three teenage girls by the meat stand. They told them about the Gospel and how much God loved them. The girls were visibly in a bit of awe about it. Then they prophesied over them all with Adam and prayed for them for joy and peace.
Hannah and I prayed for a guy on crutches. He tested his knee out and walked on it a bit and said it felt better. Not fully but partially. He was in a bit of a rush though. But was thankful.
Sarah and Jesse spoke to a girl getting a tattoo and then they talked to a lady who was limping and offered to pray (she said no). Then they saw two other people sitting on a bench. A guy called Connor and a girl called Sarah. Jesse prophesied over them and then prayed for him. Jesse told him he felt there was demonic torment in his life, he said there was so Jesse prayed for that and told it to leave.
Jesse and Sarah were encouraged that it wasn't about what they said but about sharing love with people - which felt far less pressured and scary.
So I went out with this guy called Jaime and felt led to buy a big issue. So we bought two from a guy called Colin. He was filling in for a friend who was looking to try and buy a house today. We spoke to him and asked if we could pray for him and he said not now because he had to get on with his work. So we prayed from a distance and then he came back. And Jaime asked him if he had a chesty cough and breathing trouble and he said yes and showed us his inhaler. So we prayed quickly for him and told him that through the day he would realise God had healed him.
After that we met a girl called Dominique who was working for Oxfam. We gave some money and then I said as we had helped her would she mind if we asked if there was anything she wanted prayer for. I felt strongly that she wanted prayer for a personal situation but would hide behind her cause - which she did. Jaime felt the same and that she wasn't really in the job for the cause but for the money and was feeling pressured. So he asked her if she had any pressure living situations and struggles to pay bills and she told us that yesterday she got the keys to a new place and was really worried about how she would pay for it. She was quite touched by this, so we prayed for her. We told her she would get more people giving her money for the rest and saw her later and that had happened!
Lastly we met a girl called Natalie while we were with John and we spoke to her about about Jesus and that living with him is a relationship not a religion. We wanted to share the Gospel with her because her heart was open - but she was working so we left. However, 15 minutes later she came off of work and went straight to find us to chat to us more! At which point Adam, Rachel, JJ and many others prophesied over her, prayed for her and showed her God's love. Loving on her was loads of fun!
JJ also met Chris and his mate and prophesied some cool stuff over him (the mate) as well about him having a healing gift. This was also pretty incredible!
We had an absolutely amazing day today. Essentially it's all about showing God's love to people, loving people boundlessly and having a relationship with him. It's not about converts, it's not about stories and not about testimonies, it's all about love. It was incredible.
