As I sat with Rosa on Friday in the homes of some of the sick and the widows in the village, I got to hear some of the testimonies of how God healed a son of theirs or how God healed another from a stroke. Then I was at an outreach village woman's meeting with my friend Whitney. I was listening to each woman tell three things that they were thankful for. Some of the women went on and on about how grateful they were for what God has done in their life. One woman was specifically grateful for how the Lord has released her from fear over her daughter's safety.
When I listen to these woman recount these stories, I realize even more how powerful God really is. God is working in these small little villages in remote parts of Nicaragua healing and restoring lives. Several men have come to know God because they saw the life He gives, not because of rules or fear of going to Hell. Not to say that God hasn't used people to pray or to tell people about Him, because He has, but He has been doing the work in people's hearts.
I was reading about John the Baptist. He stood out in the middle of the desert announcing Jesus' arrival. I wondered how he was so sure and convinced of this? Was this common family knowledge because of what the angels said to Mary, Joseph, Elizabeth, and Zechariah? Or did the Holy Spirit stir this in him on a separate occasion? The word says the Lord spoke to him about how to identify Jesus. My guess would be that God told him to go baptize people as well? Either way, I think it was a mix of it all. God is the one who speaks, who delivers, and who heals. He will lead us and guide us. As we spend more time with Him and opening ourselves up to Him, the Holy Spirit rises within us giving us the desires to move where He is moving because we are more attracted to Him the more we are around Him.
This gives me more faith that He will come through especially when I leave the results up to whether He comes through or not. He does the growing and grows where He wishes. We have the easy part of sowing or watering.
When I see these people affected by His goodness, that they also know this God that I have come to know, I realize how powerful He is. He isn't in a movement or the work of man's hands or a conjure of emotion. He shows up when He wants and where He wants and it is real when He does just as He did by writing the 10 commandments in front of Moses, or by descending on Jesus like a dove at His baptism. It's important to me to see that He does this. Maybe I am still combating this internal intellectualism that began in college, but it reminds me of this quote by C.S. Lewis:
"Compared with the development of man on this planet, the diffusion of Christianity over the human race seems to go like a flash of lightning—for two thousand years is almost nothing in the history of the universe. (Never forget that we are all still ‘the early Christians’. The present wicked and wasteful divisions between us are, let us hope, a disease of infancy: we are still teething. The outer world, no doubt, thinks just the opposite. It thinks we are dying of old age. But it has thought that very often before. Again and again it has thought Christianity was dying, dying by persecutions from without and corruptions from within, by the rise of Mohammedanism, the rise of the physical sciences, the rise of great anti-Christian revolutionary movements. But every time the world has been disappointed. Its first disappointment was over the crucifixion. The Man came to life again. In a sense— and I quite realise how frightfully unfair it must seem to them—that has been happening ever since. They keep on killing the thing that He started: and each time, just as they are patting down the earth on its grave, they suddenly hear that it is still alive and has even broken out in some new place. (No wonder they hate us.)"
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