A lot of the world race has felt really weird. Sometimes you end up doing the opposite of what you expected, sometimes you didn’t even know you had expectations, it’s often a weird time. One month that felt like getting back to what I expected the race to be though, was Lesotho.
Sure we hiked a mountain in the rain and camped at the top. We trekked for hours and passed through 11 river crossings to get to a waterfall we could swim in, than ate the local donuts in the back of a pickup truck while watching the sunset and going home. But these things weren’t what made it feel like it was the race.
We lived on a ministry base/ church campus, complete with drop toilets and a bed that was a stretcher, and I loved it.
Our ministry was something that I didn’t love the first week. We taught high school, and were confused on our purpose there. But one of my teammates was thriving, so it was incredible to see it through her eyes. We got to host a beauty for ashes retreat for the high school girls and seeing the way they interacted with each other and loved the activity of scripture writing was so beautiful. We asked what was most needed in the community, and the pastor’s wife told us that the girls never get to be kids and have fun. So we also had a movie day with them, complete with chocolate and cookies. Sometimes you do things you don’t thrive in, and it’s still good and growing.
The next week we did village evangelism. We walked 30-45 min each day to reach the villages and got to check up with how people in the community were. We prayed with them and got to see some incredible ways God met the needs of these people. I really enjoyed it, But I was deeply confused by the way healing happened during this week, or rather didn’t happen how I would’ve expected.
Backstory, I come from a background where healing is normal. I’ve grown up in a church that always has a story of some new person that experienced miraculous healing that week. I’ve personally seen insanely dramatic healings. I’m talking blind eyes and deaf ears opened, pain completely being gone, even people walking out of their wheelchairs they came in. So when people weren’t instantly getting their healing I was confused.
We know the will of God is that all would be healed. How do we know that? Because Jesus never left someone who came to Him unhealed. The Bible says he went around healing ALL who were oppressed by the devil. So why did it feel like healing was blocked on the race?
I had asked the Lord earlier in the race why I wasn’t seeing as many healings/ why there weren’t as many opportunities to pray for people’s healings. He said I had experienced healings on the race. They just weren’t as dramatic as I had been used to. A person getting cured of a migraine is just as much a miracle as someone walking out of a wheelchair though. Countless times I had been witness to healings on the race, like when all 20 of us miraculously tested negative for Covid and got to go to Africa even when just a few days before multiple people had tested positive. I was getting to a good place of being settled with the question of healing on the race, and simply recognizing and being grateful for all healing, dramatic or not.
I suppose one of the biggest blocks to our experiences of healing/no healing has to do with the paradigm or lens through which we see it. this has been a confusing topic for me too. Why does God heal some instantaneously and other times not? What does that have to do with fear or faith, what we believe about how and why God heals? Those are questions I’ll probably have to find out when I step fully into His kingdodm.