My power week - Part 1

So this is the story of what I have dubbed “my power week.” In actuality it is a bit longer than a week but let’s not go into semantics. Let me give you a little background leading up to this week. For those of you who don’t know, I am the Director of the High School Ministry at the Oak Park Vineyard and prior to this week I had become pretty dry. What I mean is that my walk with God was feeling very draining and heavy. I was hanging in there but was feeling burnt out.

I needed a jump-start and the perfect opportunity came up in a healing conference held in Valparaiso, IN. After a few stumbling blocks I found myself at this conference where God met me in a very tangible way. I was so hungry that at the point in the conference when most people had left, I was still there. I told God that I wanted to be there if there was even the slightest chance that He was going to do something or even if He was just going to be there. Anywhere that there was someone praying a blessing, I wiggled my way to the front. If a mantle was being passed, I wanted it. I was just plain hungry.

Friday 1/30/09
So getting started on this “power” week. It started on Friday, which was the last day of the conference. Everyone from the conference was going out on a “treasure hunt.” What you do on a treasure hunt is, first you ask God to give you clues for your treasure map. These are things like red shirt, Starbucks, back problems…or anything that could possible lead you to a person that God wants you to pray for. Then you partner up with one or two other people and you put your treasure maps together. I ended up going out with Ian and Rachel Carroll. So you use your treasure map to go to where you think God is telling you to go and you pray for people. It is really quite simple when you think about it…and/or completely terrifying.

So Rachel, Ian and I ended up going to an outside mall. We started by going to Starbucks because Rachel and I both had it on our map. Well I guess God had given that word to a lot of people because when we walked in there were about twenty people from the conference and three that were not. So we moved on with the assumption that God had Starbucks covered. (Who knows, maybe everyone just needed a little pick me up after sitting in the conference all day.) Anyway, so that I don’t just go on forever let me get to some highlights. Through clues on our treasure maps we blessed a young man working at a Sherwin Williams Paint store, blessed a woman shopping at a pet store, prayed for a young woman at Home Depot to be fanatically blessed and receive a raise, and…now for the most exciting part. Let me say, I don’t want to down play the three people we prayed for up to this point. All of them were awesome encounters with God, both for us and for them. So at Home Depot Rachel decided that she wanted some chocolate, after all who doesn’t like chocolate. As Ian and Rachel were being rung up Ian said something to the effect of, “If God didn’t want us to eat chocolate, He wouldn’t have made so much of it.” To which the cashier responded, “Yea. I ate a lot of chocolate ice cream after I had a tumor on my tong removed.” **Hold on a minute. Stop the story. How did we go from chocolate to tumors? All I have to say is thank you Jesus.** So Ian asked her how the tumor was doing right now and she said that it had actually just come back. We asked to pray for her and she said yes. Before we prayed we asked how much pain there was on a scale of 0-10, ten being that she needed to go to the hospital. She said it was a 7. We prayed. God came, and the pain went down to a 3. Come on God. But it still hurt a bit so we prayed again and it went down to a 2. At that point she was getting anxious with other customers and such so we told her a bit about Jesus and left.

Holy cow! What a way to start off this healing thing. A tumor. I’m thinking let’s pray for a headache and God says nope, pray for a tumor. God is so awesome.

To be continued...