When faith comes - A Testimony

I’m writing this article as a footnote on last weeks one on faith. So here goes –

At a Pioneer (network of churches) event in 1999, a whole load of us youth (I was 15 at the time), randomly went into a café that was on site. No one was in the café, so we started to spontaneously pray for one another. Some hours had gone by and there was an idea to pray for people who needed healing. At the time I had a lot of back pains, one of the reasons was because one leg was slightly shorter than the other, which was pushing into my back (notice that I said “was”).

A friend of mine sat me down with my legs stretching out and you could see that my right leg was slightly shorter than my left leg. He began to pray for me and I kept my eyes open and saw my right leg grow to the same length of my left leg and there was no pain in my back.

The next day Pete Greig asked me to speak about what happened at a seminar he was doing, to which I came forward and spoke. After I finished speaking about my healing, Pete collected the mic from me and I thought in my head “ok that’s it, cool”. But no, Pete said to everyone at the meeting that if anyone has the same problem that I (me) had then go to a section of the room and for me to pray for them. This threw me right off; really shocked and surprised. Anyway I went with it and it turned out that there were 7 people who had the same problem. I can remember thinking, “Lord please help me to help these people, I can’t do this, so you better do something. (lol)”.

So I sat each one on a chair one at a time, got them to stretch their legs out where you could see that they had one leg shorter than the other. I prayed for each person and all 7 of them were healed with their legs growing in line with each other and having no pain in their back. I was completely blown away by this.

I can honestly say that even though I was a bit nervous and said to God “I can’t do this but I know you can” I felt a burden being lifted from me and was now not scared of what people would think of me if no one got healed at all. I also recognized that it was God who gave me the faith that He would heal these people as He healed me the night before. It wasn’t down to me if they would get healed or not, it was down to God. Pete had obviously heard from God not only that there were people who needed healing, but also that I should pray for them (at least I hope he heard from God and wasn’t just a joke, lol). And because of that he responded to God by saying what he said and I had responded through the faith that God had given me.

So here’s the application - It is God who gives us the faith and we do not need to disqualify ourselves from giving him the opportunity to work through us.