CAVANNA

An old friend of mine from Bible School days, Pastor Gareth Benton, made contact. Gareth now heads up a thriving church in Portsmouth, and he extended a kind invitation for me to minister in his Sunday evening, student based gathering. I was surprised to see so many young people present and perhaps a little hesitant about how talk of ‘signs and wonders’ would go down among these analytical, academic types! My prejudice was shown to be quite wrong however, as the evening proved to be a night of extraordinary Holy Spirit power.

As has become usual, there were a number of people who testified immediately to the removal or reduction of pain. A problem in the kidneys disappeared, a child with a troublesome toe nail was cured, a man became free of abdominal pain; still others with bad feet, arms and knees were able to move freely again, much to their delight. Three special miracles that evening included a young man by the name of Lee. He beamed with joy as his deafened ears were opened by Christ, holding his hearing aids now in his hands. Another man, also deaf in a single ear, due to a military accident, also asked for prayer. The Lord touched him too and he testified to the restoration of his hearing. I will not forget a young woman from Romania who had suffered for years with pain in her joints. She was very quickly cured and looked more than a little stunned as she told told me of her miraculous recovery. There is nothing like the astonished face of a healed person!

Four weeks later, I visited St Andrews Church of England in Histon, just outside Cambridge, on a warm Sunday evening. Although located in a village, this fairly well known and successful church has a growing congregation with multiple services and much blessing. Many of the cures wrought here were not instant, but through some persistence, a number of those present began to share how a sure improvement to their condition was being experienced.
My two favourite testimonies given that evening were obvious. One was a middle-aged man who began to weep as his bad right ear opened, coupled with amazing new mobility in his stiffened neck. The other was more unusual in terms of my own ministry: a lady released from a significant burden of personal grief. For obvious reasons of confidentially, no more ought to be recorded; only that those who were interceding for me later reported that this is exactly how the Lord led them to pray on that occasion.

The final visit of the Spring period was in Barrow-in-Furness at the end of June. Pastor Joe Hayes had received me three years earlier and I remembered that the church was really good soil for the miraculous! Over the course of two Sunday services, there were seven people who testified to full or partial recovery. A lady was able to bend her knees again, and another with a frozen shoulder began moving it; while another found that the pain in her side had vanished. A man who had fallen in an accident eight years previously shared how he believed he was now healed, and he began jumping up and down in the church lobby to test this out! A further lady who had a tremor in her hand fell under the power and, after prayer, got up obviously healed.

    

Most notable during these meetings was a mother and her daughter, who were both dramatically cured by the Lord Jesus. Mum had one leg shorter than the other, making walking difficult. She danced her way around the church after prayer (see above) and immediately went out on Sunday afternoon to purchase walking boots! Her daughter was suffering with a continual back pain that had begun after she had given birth, nine months previously. She could barely believe it as she bent down and moved freely again in the evening service. She told me that she was about to return to work that very week.

Praise God!

May/June 2009