What Is The Holy Spirit Saying To You?

Yesterday a pastor came to me asking for help. His daughter has been in the hospital in Beira for three months with a strange tumor growing inside her jaw. They live about 4 hours away by car, longer by public transportation. Him and his wife have 6 children and because of having to be there with his daughter at the hospital, he has not been back home to see his wife or other children. He has also not been able to work in order to earn money to pay for any hospital expenses, medicine, or even food.

When he came to me, he said that no one was willing to help him or even visit his daughter in the hospital. He told us that people are very helpful when it comes to funeral expenses and will even come a long way to attend them, but do not help before things progress to that point. We don't know why. Maybe it's because of the high mortality rate here so people may have a since of hopelessness, but that is only my assumption.

We chose to help him buy the medicine needed to take care of her. I told him that we would keep them in our prayers and Susan then asked him if we could pray for his daughter right there with him "standing in" for her. So we prayed for several minutes and he began to cry. Susan then suggested we go to the hospital later that afternoon to visit her and pray for her directly. He was so happy and thankful. He said to me a little later, "You have our Father's heart". I think that is one of the greatest compliments a person can say to another and inwardly I thanked God for allowing us the opportunity to share His love.

We left a few minutes later with the other missionaries to go into Beira for our weekly trip to buy groceries and run other errands. These trips usually take a few hours because of numerous stops and on our way back I told Susan that I kind of wish we didn't obligate ourselves to going to the hospital. We came back to the base from the shopping trip, picked up a couple other people, then went back to Beira to visit the Pastor's daughter in the hospital. Our translator, Lovemore, also asked if he could go to pray for her as well.

We drove the 30-40 minutes to the hospital and the Pastor met us at the gate to take us to her. There were 5 of us that went (including our translator). The hospitals here are not up to the standards that we are accustomed to in the U.S. They are not very clean and far from being sanitary. They are crowded and the patients share open rooms with many others.

We met the Pastor's daughter and after a few minutes we prayed for her. Then we prayed for the three other children who were there for similar reasons. One very young boy was grossly disfigured because of the extent of sub-surface facial tumors.

We then had others who had seen us praying for those children come over and ask us to pray for their children as well. The sicknesses and diseases varied from malaria to diabetes. Lovemore had school that night, and we were much later than expected. Because we didn't want him to be late for school, we asked him what he wanted to do. He said to us, "What is the Holy Spirt saying to you?" Laura, one of the missionaries, said, "What is He saying to you." Lovemore said, "Well, school is important, and I don't want to be late, but these people need prayer and are asking for prayer so let's stay and pray." And so we did.

We prayed for about 15 children and also for many of the parents. We visited a little with them as well. They all seemed so thankful for our being there. I, myself, didn't feel like it was an obligation anymore but instead a tremendous privilege. We were all very blessed to be able to share Christ's love with others, and we left there feeling God's great love for us.