Can’t Earn His Love
Two weeks ago my team went to live in a remote village called Teupasenti. While we were there, the pastor of a small church led us around the village and brought us into the homes of people who had requested prayer. There was one woman in particular whose name seems to have slipped my mind but whose story does not. We weren’t told anything about her on the way to her home but as we began to walk, it became hard for me to breathe. My lungs and chest felt heavy and without any good reason. To be honest I was a little freaked out and almost told the team to go on without me so I could wait this out. I quickly decided against the idea and felt God saying He wanted me to pray for this woman. When we got there the woman told us that she had some sort of skin irritation, blood problems, and a respiratory disease. This is when it got really cool. God allowed me to experience just a little bit of what she’d been dealing with for so long. After leaving the house, one of my teammates, Katie, said that she’d also experienced the same trouble breathing. We didn’t see any immediate and drastic change but trusted that God has a perfect plan and operates within His perfect timing.
This week, however, we got a call from the village saying that the woman we prayed for had gotten some tests done at the hospital. The results came back saying that there was absolutely nothing wrong with her anymore. She’d experienced complete healing! How incredible is our God!? It was not because of anything I did. It wasn’t because of anything my team did. There were no magic words or a special healing script to follow. My prayers are no more powerful than anybody else’s. We just asked a big God to do a big thing, and He did! And this is only one story of many. God is SO good and SO powerful!
God’s love is so free and so intense that He literally can do anything we ask. He simply gives because He loves. Not because we had a good week and earned our dessert. You can’t earn His affections. God cares more about our hearts than our deeds. He answers our prayers because He loves us; not because we’ve earned it. Salvation is free because if He didn’t pay for it with a perfect sacrifice, it would be too expensive for us to earn by ourselves. We would be stuck trying to live out a legalistic and tiring faith that could never amount to enough. This God I thought I’ve known my whole life is becoming so real and new to me. It’s unbelievable.
If you’re reading this on Passport’s website and trying to decide whether or not you should go, it can’t hurt to apply. If you have knots in your stomach when you think about leaving home and just trusting God, do it. If you have an appetite for adventure, a desire to know God more intimately than you ever have before, and want to see God do some crazy stuff, Immersion is the trip for you.
God bless,
Kevin
A few pictures of my team's adventures throughout the last few weeks:
Playing in a flood (Teupasenti)
Carly and I teaching grades five through eight at Loyalty School (Tegusigalpa)
A visit to the Public Hospital (Tegusigalpa)
Stefan and I on property maintenance (Tizatillo)
