I want to share a beautiful story of the love and healing power of our risen Savior and King Jesus Christ. When I encourage and invite people to join an HLM trip I tell them don't just hear the stories of how our LORD is working there come and be a story! Allow the LORD to use you for the Kingdom! The story below was another opportunity for our teams to do personal evangelism in the home of a Muslim family.
Im-Anees*, an Arab Muslim woman living in a Muslim neighborhood near our Bethlehem ministry location, weeps while I sit in her living room along with 12 others hearing her story how guilt has been eating at her because she has let down her husband and children. She gave birth to six children and three of the six were born with mental and physical disabilities. Since she has been told by those closest to her that she’s to blame for the mental disabilities of her three children, because she let fear and stress during the Israeli-Palestinian war conflict affect her emotional state while pregnant which lead to the disabilities.
As I internally began to ask the Lord to touch her heart to enable her to open up she begins to tell us that she feels hopeless and helpless and as a Muslim woman she cannot see any sign of hope. I wanted to give her a few minutes to catch a breath from being so emotional, so I switched back to having some of our team members share, who some were from the U.S. joining our HLM educational missions tour trip.
While one of our team members were sharing, her son Anees the middle child with the most severe mental disability, comes in the living room half crawling and screaming. His sporadic crying and shouting made it hard for any of us even the mother to continue talking. I looked at his mother’s face I could tell she was broken, stressed and felt ashamed which is something many in the Middle Eastern culture struggle with. I got up out of my seat walked over to her and told her I'd like to pray over your son Anees.
He looked into my eyes and stretched his hands over to me, I reached my hands out he grabbed my fingers and I looked close into his eyes and in Arabic I said Anees, Jesus loves you! I immediately began to pray out loud in Arabic over him, calmly I declared the Name and commanded the power of Jesus. His legs straightened up, his eyes now rolled towards the normal position and he stood up and gave me the biggest most joyful smile I have ever seen in such circumstance, he became completely calm and at peace.
His mother started crying, now these tears were tears of Joy. I looked at her and told her Jesus is the Greatest healer not only can He heal your son Anees but can also heal your heart and Spirit. That evening around 10:30 I received a call from a friend of Im-Anees’ family asking me what exactly happened? She tells me the Muslim neighborhood are saying, “Jesus is back, and is healing again!” They are referring to Quran scriptures that teach “Jesus was the greatest healer to walk on earth.” A few weeks later we saw over 30+ from this community attend our outreach, their desire simply was “we want to learn more about Jesus, we want to be around His followers to learn more”. This is the Lord at work...for a time such as this.
*names have been changed
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