CAVANNA

After witnessing a welcome return of some miracles and wonders in our home church of Cambridge during Sunday worship, it was my privillege to be invited to minister at GPC (Grays Pentecostal Church) in Essex in March. On the journey down to Grays early on the Sunday morning, I was mindful that there might be a BBC film crew present. A producer had been in contact with our friend John Mellor, and then called me, seeking permission to shoot some footage of a healing meeting for a documentary, but I had no idea if they were going to show up or not! For good or for ill, they weren’t there when I arrived and I began to enjoy the worship and the great spirit in this thriving multi-national Assemblies of God church.

GPC meet in a hired school hall and the pastor invited me to begin sharing the Word with the folks there. As has become so wonderfully common, the Spirit of the Lord began to minister to the people while I was speaking and when I asked people to check out their physical conditions, there were a number who began waving at me (mostly men) to testify to some miraculous improvement. Lots of these were experiencing a release of movement after a period of restriction; and the accompanying freedom from pain. One lady began lifting her arm up and down excitedly, as she hadn’t been able to do it for a while, praise God! Once again, I had not prayed for any of these people, but the Lord had sovereignly touched them! The level of faith and expectancy in the room rose significantly as, one after the other, folks began calling out their healings.

I felt I had a word of knowledge to do with the healing of someone with a dairy allergy. Hearing this, a parent left the room to get hold of her child from Sunday School who suffered from this problem and we called upon God for her. When I asked for those who were sick and wanted prayer to come forward, quite a crowd gathered at the front, and I wondered how I was going to find time to minister to each one of them in my usual way. Thank God for his grace, and for Jane who began laying her prayerful hands on the people with me. The results were truly wonderful. It is so hard to estimate numbers and there is always the danger of exaggerating the event which does not please the Lord or benefit anyone. But it seemed like three out of every five people we prayed with were able to testify to some instant improvement, which of course does not include those who would discover that they were healed later.

I especially remember a precious young lady whose back was damaged in a car accident some two years before receive an amazing breakthrough as Jesus took her pain and restriction away. The look of surpise and joy as she bent, swerved, ducked and dived in all directions was priceless. It may be worth mentioning that the first couple of times I prayed for her, she experienced no change. What was also memorable was that in that healing line, a large number of both young children and the more senior aged folks receive God’s touch. It seems that God loves healing all ages of the spectrum. One thing we all know about children is that they can’t be fooled and so it is always a joy to hear their raw but honest testimonies. A cheer went up as a young teenage girl began running up and down on a knee that couldn’t have done that before. To demonstrate the point further, she began hopping!

Perhaps the most exciting of all the healings to me in Grays was that of an African lady, Joyce, who made her way to the front to tell an amazing story. She had suffered for a long time with a growth on the back of her neck. During the meeting, she testified that it had become very painful and sore. However, as she examined it, she began to believe that the pain she was experiencing from the growth was because it was being operated on by the Lord, and that it was shrinking! When she came to speak at the front, she showed me the growth, which by that time was so small I could only pinpoint it by putting the end of one finger on it. Because this was an especially powerful story, I asked for anyone in the room who knew Joyce to come and verify what she was saying. Probably the best witness was her granddaughter who was happy to tell us about her grandmother’s growth. However, by this time the growth had now completely gone, having shrunk to nothing while we were talking! All that was left was the identation of the lady’s clothes where the presence of the growth had pushed the garments away from the back of the neck; an empty space which now testified to the love and power of Jesus Christ! It was an extraordinary healing and the room celebrated with this joyful grandmother.

There was more happened in Grays than I can remember or tell here. The meeting, which was due to finish at 12.15, went on so long we were eventually asked to leave the school hall by the caretaker locking up the building at two o’clock! I was exhausted at the end but it was time worth spending among this hungry and faith-filled crowd! I await to here many more testimonies and can only be thankful for the goodness of Jesus.

Praise God!

Six months after this visit to Grays, I received a wonderful testimony over the telephone from a lady who was healed of a prolapsed bladder during that meeting. With so many months having passed, this made the testimony all the more exciting and glorious. She no longer suffers from this condition and is thankful to God for His healing.

March 2007