by Josh Kim
This past summer there was a conviction in my heart to seek more of God and change my prayer life. I don’t know how to explain it, but I felt that God wanted to do something new. I didn’t specifically know what that was, but all I knew was to abide in Him so I would be prepared and aware of what He was up to. (Looking back, I realize that God wanted to release new power in my life, and the only way for Him to release it was if I abided in Him. Bill Johnson, in his book, When Heaven Invades Earth, says it perfectly, “The life of power is a life of abiding.”)
So almost every evening this past summer, I took 20 minute walks with God around my neighborhood to simply pray, commune, and have conversations with God. I especially prayed for my two upcoming summer missions trip to Ivory Coast in August and Colombia in September – just general things like finances, protection, unity within our teams, etc. But I remember one evening God telling me, “Ask for more! I’m going to release new power. So ask for more!”
In faith, I responded back to Him, “God, I want to see miracles, like the ones I read in the Bible, on these mission trips this summer. It’s not enough to hear from others about your miracles, but I want to experience you healing your people, where it could only be done by you, for myself!”
God responded back, “You will receive what your faith expects (Matthew 9:29).”
I want to share how Jesus healed two people in miraculous ways on my mission trips this summer. Reflecting upon the healings still today, I am in awe that Jesus allowed me to be a part of the healing process of those two miracles. The healings were things I could have never imagined, but only by God’s grace and power does the impossible become possible. As I share these testimonies, I hope it encourages you to keep pursuing for breakthroughs in your own life, to ask God for the impossible, and to know that our God is good father who still heals His people today.
IVORY COAST – OTHELLO
In August, my team and I traveled to Ivory Coast, Africa for a missions trip where we go to a village and evangelize door to door. My team came across three young adults hanging out at a boutique store. We talked about an hour about the gospel and God, but in the end, they did not accept Jesus.
As my team and I were leaving the boutique, I noticed a young girl standing right outside the boutique store and her right eye was very cloudy and opaque. She was actually the younger sister of one of the young adults we were talking to. Her name was Othello and she is 11 years old. She was born blind, which prevented the nerves that connect from the eye to the brain to properly develop; therefore, all she saw through her right eye was darkness.
The funny thing was that there was an eye surgeon (David Kim) on our team who knew all about the medical terms, conditions, causes, etc. So I asked David, “Is there anything that can be done for this girl so that she can regain her sight?”
David began to explain to me the severity of the girl’s blindness. The condition of the nerves not developing and connecting her brain and eye is like having a hand cut off from your arm. Even if the hand gets reconnected to the arm, there is no way that it will properly function after being detached for so long. In the same way, even if somehow a nerve was to miraculously develop and connect her eye and brain, there is no guarantee she would be able to see. At the end, David replied, “Unless God intervenes, there is nothing that can be done. Her condition is IRREVERSIBLE. Medically speaking, it’s IMPOSSIBLE.”
After hearing “irreversible” and “impossible”, my faith stirred up and I knew that the abiding in the summer evenings with God was for this very moment. So I suggested to our team that we pray for Jesus to heal Othello and her blindness. We specifically prayed that the nerves would miraculously form, develop, and connect her eye and brain so she would be able to see for the first time in her life. When we prayed the first time, nothing happened. She still wasn’t able to see anything. But after we prayed for the second time, she said she was able to see! Our team was shocked. We asked her to verify and she claimed that she was able to see light for the first time. David used his medical skills to test her right eye with the flashlight on his smartphone and confirmed that she was actually seeing light!
David, in that moment, told our group, “Medically speaking, what just happened now was a miracle. She should not be able to see light. That means that supernaturally, God did a miracle to develop and connect the nerve from her eye to her brain.”
We told her that we wanted to pray one more time for full healing since she still wasn’t able to see figures or images. Nothing happened beyond that but we told Othello that Jesus was the one who healed her to see light and that He loves her so much. There was this big smile that came across her face, which I’ll never forget.
The amazing thing about this testimony is that there is hope for Othello to fully regain her sight and see normally from that moment on. For people with her eye condition, there is a surgery that can be done where they remove the outer layer of the cornea so that people can see again. But this surgery only works if the blind person is able to see light at the minimum. The problem for Othello was that even if she got the surgery done, and the outer layer of her cornea removed, it would have been still ineffective due to her inability to see light. However, now that she is able to see light (due to the supernatural formation of the nerve), she is now able to get that specific surgery done and regain her eyesight afterwards. Initially, I was disappointed that she was only able to see light because I wanted her to see perfectly. But when David told our group that she was now able to get the surgery mentioned above, I realized that Jesus always leave us with hope!
COLOMBIA – KAYLA
In September, my team and I worked with the indigenous people group of Colombia and Venezuela called the Wayuu. They live pretty isolated away from society in the deserts and only 2 percent of the people group believe in Jesus and are Christians. There are few local churches amongst the Wayuu communities and we visited one church called Zion, where we were ran a VBS (Vacation Bible School) program for the Wayuu children.
When the program for the children ended, our team was about to head out until our missionary partner asked us if we could pray for healing for some of the adults of that church and community. There was an older man who was dealing with kidneys stones and pain in his leg, a grandma with her granddaughter who was sick for an extended period of time without any explanations, a female youth who had a lump in her left breast, and few other people. Our team prayed for each person one by one. Many of the people’s conditions weren’t able to be verified in that moment, except for the female youth with a lump in her breast. We asked her to check if the lump was still there. After checking, she said that the lump in her breast was gone! We told her that that could only be Jesus who miraculously removed the lump.
(Kayla is the girl on the left.)
The young girl’s name was Kayla and our team found out that she actually had not been to church for almost a year due to her own personal reasons. The youth pastor of the Zion church was telling us that he was trying to get her to come back to church but she never did. Even the day before our team was there, there was an event at the church that the youth pastor was trying to get Kayla to come out to but she never showed up. However, she heard that a foreign team from America was coming to Zion church the next day. For some reason, she felt in her spirit that she needed to go to church when we would arrive. So she wore her best clothes and came to help out with the VBS program. But she could have never imagined that her healing, miracle, and breakthrough was just waiting to happen by coming to church that evening.
YOU WILL RECEIVE WHAT YOUR FAITH EXPECTS
I hope those testimonies of healing encourage you that Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8). Also, I hope they encourage you that God is so active, intimate, and involved in our lives more than we can ever know. He knows what we need before we even say a word. Just like with Othello and Kayla, He worked out everything so perfectly so He could pour out His goodness upon them just at the right time. So if you’re in a season of waiting upon God for healing, breakthrough, or a miracle in your life, I want to say to you to keep holding on to His promises. God knows what He’s doing. As Francis MacNutt says, “But in His wisdom, God knows far better than we the time and place for healing to take place.” Keep trusting in God and His goodness for you will receive what your faith expects!