Healing Conference: Natick, Massachusetts

It has been some time since we've been on an outreach, but finally we got to do our first one of the trimester. This one sent us back to MetroWest just outside of Boston to attend their healing conference.

On the way to MetroWest

Friday was fairly straight forward; the guest speaker was a guy named Doug Collins who has recently gained favor in the Christian world because of God's impartation of signs and miracles to him. He basically went straight into praying for people and involving us interns in the prayer process. While others were assigned to different people, I specifically saw one woman who stood out to me. Her name was Annie, and she had flown in all the way from Vancouver. She is in a wheelchair due to MS. It was rather funny; I thought I was going to be the one ministering to her but she ended up giving me some ministry of her own! Once she finished that, I felt prompted by the Holy Spirit to sing words of life over her and then pray. She was able to get up on her feet holding me and then go a few steps, but then had to sit back down. I was told later that's more than she has been able to do before, which is pretty cool! We are going to be keeping in touch over email.

On Saturday Doug gave a brief message before sending everyone out to the streets. We were to ask people if they would like prayer for anything in need of healing. This part of the trip was hard for me. The interns were all split up into individual groups, and I was randomly asked by 3 older women to join their group. It's not that they weren't nice, but I really wanted to have at least one other guy in the group, and I couldn't just say no because of that. We went to the local mall, and things just got more awkward as my group was steered towards the ladies' sections in department stores (including a brief trip through lingerie), and then a baby store. In the latter location, I split off from the others to try a different approach: connecting through children. A man in his early 30s was watching his 6 month old daughter in her carriage, and I went up and just made conversation involving his daughter. Finally after I was comfortable enough with our discussion I asked him if he would like prayer for anything in particular that needed healing. He said no, but pray for the people in Iraq and Virginia Tech. I wished him and his daughter well and went back to reunite with my group.

Once we got back to MetroWest there was a time of story sharing and then Doug prayed over different infirmities in need of healing, and then empowered people through prayer into different ministries. As we were cleaning up, I went into the portion of MetroWest where a Brazilian church takes place. I met a young guy named Andre who speaks Portuguese, some English, some Spanish and he is currently learning French! He was a lot of fun, and we'll be keeping in touch. He said he wants to have phone conversations with me in a different language each time. I'm going to have my hands full!

While we're on the topic of languages - there is a team of 7 of us going to Mexico: me, Jamie Bower (Airdrie AB), Jessica Hamlet (Virginia), Anton Luse (New Jersey), my bro Luke (Calgary AB), Sharayah Quinn (Lindenhurst NY) and Jesse Smith (Michigan). My duty is to teach the team some basic Spanish, but here's the kicker: I'm learning it before I teach it! Jamie has expressed great interest in becoming fluent and teaching as well, so the two of us are going to work together at instructing. I'm really looking forward to the challenge!