I really don’t like healing outreaches. I thought to myself while I was walking to the beach with a group of about six other Christians from Operation Extreme Love carrying a sign proclaiming “Free Healing.”

This really isn’t my thing. What if people don’t get healed? Jesus, you’d better show up!

A curious bar girl stopped us while we were walking. “Can you pray for my broken heart?” she asked. We did. I’m not sure what happened.

We went on… An agnostic on the beach stopped us wondering by what power we could heal. We told him it was Jesus and prayed for his ankle. It didn’t feel any different, he said. I found myself thinking, Where is someone like Neil or Kawika when I need them? I’m not good at this.

But I kept pressing on. Hoping. Maybe Jesus would show up for me like He does for my friends.

We talked to this older guy who was playing guitar for tips. He asked us if we would pray to Jesus for healing. We said yes. He said he didn’t have pain but he wanted to know more about God. So we let him ask questions and answered as best as we could. As we were talking we found out that he had read the entire Bible – Genesis to Revelation. He knew how the world began and he knew that it would end with Jesus coming back for his own but those who did not know him would be cast into a lake of fire. “When I am older and have more money, I would like to become a Christian,” he said. I nodded. Then felt prompted to ask him what would keep him from becoming a Christian today. As we talked, his excuses fell away and he made a decision to make Jesus Lord.

Then there was this girl named Lynn who wanted prayer for her knees. She explained that she had bone on bone in her knees and that she had just gone to the doctor for an injection to help the pain that morning. I shared with her that I knew how much pain it is to have bone on bone but that God had been healing my feet so that I could wear flip flops now after having to wear supportive shoes with arch supports for so long. We prayed for her pain to go and she said the pain had gotten better by about 50%. So we prayed again and the pain decreased to 25%. We prayed again and it was totally gone! Lynn got so excited that she said, “You have to come meet my dad!”

We went with her to a beach side restaurant where she insisted on opening up sodas for the three of us that had prayed with her while she explained to her dad what had happened. He then came and sat in a chair with us and explained that he had something like congestive heart failure where he hadn’t been able to work at all without getting exhausted. So we prayed for him and asked him to test and see if there was anything different. He started running up and down the stairs from the beach to the sidewalk, then in circles on the beach, and he was just beaming. Then he started stacking chairs…. And he was still beaming. He couldn’t have done that before! Praise God!

So many vendors right in that spot started coming and letting us pray for them. A woman with a broken finger let us pray for her and her finger was healed. Then a man with sore shoulders from carrying around his wares let us pray and his pain left. And a woman with pain in her feet experienced complete healing as well. It was so awesome to see God moving through us… despite my faith.

I began realizing that it’s not so much about my level of faith as it is about the strength of His love and what He has already done. At the end of our outreach, I met this woman who was deaf. I desperately wanted to pray for her because I had enough faith to believe she would be healed. But she felt that since she was a Buddhist she didn’t want us to pray. Yet I know His love and His sacrifice is strong enough for her too and that the seeds we sowed in love will be added to others until one day a harvest is reaped in her life. I’m asking Papa to keep stirring love that is stronger than my fear so that I will have the courage to pray, to love.