But God had other plans... More on this tonight after the special unexpected opportunity to help Randy Clark minister to 3,000 Brazilian pastors and leaders.
We have had the most amazing time in the past few days. One night, Randy had preached and shown a couple of video clips of testimonies from past healing ministry trips to Brazil. As soon as they were finished a woman rushed out of the room. A wee while later, she ran up on the stage and it turns out that after watching miracles on the clips, she had her own one. She suffered from kidney stones and felt she had to rush to the bathroom. Before she had time to urinate, three kidney stones dropped out into her hand. No pain, no trouble. She brought them in and showed them caught in a piece of toilet paper. They we three different sizes and we're rough and black. I got a photo of them, if you want to see... And even if you don't, I think I will post them :-). Just gob-smacking. She was understandably crying and amazed.
After that, here was a great rush of people coming forward for prayer. I had a line of people, mostly complaining of pain. Shoulder pain, back pain in four people and all healed, bang bang bang. Then just to keep me humble, a woman saying her baby had died in the womb. She had pain and bleeding. She has a specialist appointment in 4 days. The pain went and I commanded the bleeding to stop and life to return. I sure hope there is a good result. But even if it is just that the pain stopped, it is good. She gave me a looooong hug of appreciation.
Then a large woman with a ten-year history of inguinal hernia and severe pain in both legs and feet. As she asked, I started with the leg and foot pain - which all left straight away. Then I "attacked" the hernia, which grew slightly smaller, the pain went, but I couldn't get it to disappear. I was just about to start praying for the next woman but the call came for the team to go home, so I handed over the prayer engagement to my interpreter :-). They do amazingly well. One interpreter said to me at the end of the evening, "Thank you so much for your modelling of how to pray. I shall be able to do it now and I am much more confident " ( or words to that effect). I couldn't ask for more!