Hello everyone! As you have probably inferred, I am pretty behind on my blog, but I am not too worried. Alabanza, gloria y honor a solamente Dios verdadero y santo!
I want to encourage you before I tell you about day before yesterday.
| If all the prayers that were promised were actually prayed, this would be a different world by now. — John Eldredge from Moving Mountains |
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| Why I Stopped Saying ‘I’ll Pray For You’ by John Eldredge, from Moving Mountains
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I’ve come to the place where I have had to stop telling people, “I’ll pray for you.” I simply know that despite my good intentions — and these promises are almost always spoken with good intent — I know that nine times out of ten I just don’t remember to follow through. Not until maybe a week or two later, and then I feel guilty that I forgot. I don’t like promising something I probably won’t live up to. You know how these stories go: Someone you care about tells you of their pain, need, or struggle, and you respond with, “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that; I’ll pray for you.” But then, most of the time, we never do. If all the prayers that were promised were actually prayed, this would be a different world by now. So instead of promising future prayer, what I try to do nowadays is stop, right there in the moment, and pray. Right then and there. It’s funny how many Christians this actually throws off guard. “You mean, right now?” “Yes — absolutely. Let’s pray.” In the restaurant, in the car, on the plane, wherever. If it’s a text or e-mail request, I’ll start praying as I type my response, typing out a prayer for them right then and there. Not only does it help me follow through, but it helps them to agree right along with what I have prayed, and agreement is mighty powerful, as we know. I’m thinking of St. Patrick, how he would pray through the course of the day as he worked: “Tending flocks was my daily work, and I would pray constantly through the daylight hours. The love of God and the fear of Him surrounded me more and more — and faith grew and the spirit was roused, so that in one day I would say as many as a hundred prayers and after dark nearly as many again.”1 He simply did it right there, in the moment. For the truth is, there is no “later.” Now is the time to pray, for now is all we really have. “Jesus, come into this — we invite You into this” is a great place to start. Whatever the need — guidance, direction, encouragement, healing, protection; the cancelled flight, the report from the doctor, the tension in relationship — this is the place to start. Invite Jesus right into the heart of it all, right there, in the moment. “Jesus, come into this — we invite You into this.” We do this often in our meetings at Ransomed Heart. Someone will say, “I think we ought to pray about such-and-such,” and I’ll reply, “Go for it. Lead us. Right now,” and we’ll stop what we are doing and pray. Because if we don’t, we rarely get back around to it. I don’t know how many Christian meetings I’ve been in — board meetings, elder meetings — when all the time is used talking about what needs prayer, and we find we have barely a few minutes left at the end for one quick, little, rushed prayer. It’s a brilliant ploy of the enemy — keep God’s people talking about it, debating, conjecturing, worrying over it, speculating, so they never really get around to praying. By all means, pray when you have time and space to devote yourself to it, time to truly seek God. But pray now too — because you don’t know that you will get to it later. |
The morning of 2/16/16, we went to la iglesia and prayed for about five sick and elderly people that had come to be prayed for at the request of the pastor. While here, we met up with Erwin (whom has been officially nicknamed “Neville” by my dad for whatever reason), as well as his friend Daniel, who speaks very good English. Neville was busy with his Bible study that day, so he was leaving us with his Bible study partner Daniel.
After quite a while of praying for the sweet elderly people of the church, we gave each of them a big bag of food, which I told you about packaging. We also gave them each a shirt that says “His Word Shall Not Return Void.” These are made by a good friend of ours. You can check the shirts out at this link.
After this sweet time of prayer and gifts, we gathered together a small team of the three of us, four Nicaraguan girls that were about 20 years old, a Nicaraguan man around their age, an older Nicaraguan man, our new interpreter Daniel, who didn’t get a goofy nickname, as well as Pastor Jairo.
The eleven of us piled into our truck, primarily four in the truck bed, five in the back seat, and two in the front seat. This quickly changed to around six or seven in the truck bed. We headed first to a home not too far away in a nearby poor neighborhood. We ministered to a lady who described her healing from cancer. We provided her with a large bag of food and accepted her invitation to see her sick granddaughter.
This girl had been in the hospital for kidney disease and now had a flu-like virus, which turned out to be going around. I had had it right before we went to Nicaragua, and the whole area was ridden with the stuff. It is called adenovirus. Below, the girl who had it can be found in the chair on the right side in any of the pictures.
Anyway, so we prayed for her, but the focus soon turned to her mother, the above lady’s daughter. We asked the woman if she was sure of her salvation. She was not, so we had the blessing of leading her to Jesus’ open arms!!!!!!!!! 🙂
After this, we set out again. This time, we wound throughout long and windy, but beautiful, roads. After a good amount of winding, we carefully climbed up and down a couple rocks which made up this house’s steps and driveway. We stepped into the long smoky main room, which was very dark.
We walked through the main room and out the back door, which led to a little shed in the back with chickens and dogs everywhere. There was another back door in the house which led to a smaller room. After walking out the back door of the main room, we turned left and into a very smoky and dark room which had a fire going. In the 75 degree weather, a room with a smoky fire in it was most undesireable.
Worse, the small adjoining room had a young woman who had the same virus as the original girl. This young Christian woman was stuck in the dark, musty room with not many people. We prayed for her healing, and her fever began to break.
TBC
It’s way after bedtime, especially for an 11-year-old that has to get up at 4:30 tomorrow. And I haven’t even gotten to lunch yet! Adios!
Elle's Everyday 