Our prayer team was asked to be available to pray with people who may have been affected by a very recent tragedy involving one of the local pastors who was supposed to speak during the service. We gathered as a team to ask Holy Spirit how we should prepare. He said, "Let's do a treasure hunt." This seemed like a strange response, but Holy Spirit is the embodiment of Power, Hope, Joy, Fun, Creativity... Why would I expect anything different to come from Him? We began to change our focus.
A treasure hunt is a game played where you ask Holy Spirit to give you "clues" so you can find the treasure Jesus wants to touch at any given time. We prayed. Each of us heard a list of items ranging from color to gender to age and ailments or situations people might be dealing with. We wrote what we heard, shared our lists with each other, and took them into the service. Then we watched.
One of the team heard items from her list mentioned by not one, but two of the pastors who were speaking during the evening. She was able to pray with them after and they received what Jesus wanted for each of them. Another team member took the phrase, "funny bone" that another person heard, to mean that God wanted to take a painful situation and turn it into joy. In speaking that interpretation out, she changed the course of the evening in the service. My husband was watching for a woman in a red and white horizontal shirt. His clue was that she would be sitting in the "front" row. He stood in the back and watched. During the service, a family came in and sat down in the back. One of the members, a woman, wore a red and white horizontal striped shirt. Holy Spirit showed him that she was in the row right "in front" of him. She was the treasure Jeff was looking for and Holy Spirit was beginning to get creative.
My list said, "Boots, pre-teen, boy, yellow and sadness." I felt instructed to fold under the last word and keep it just between Holy Spirit and me, but to pray joy (the opposite spirit) over the boy if I found him. We walked into the service and immediately I saw the target. A boy wearing a yellow shirt and a bright yellow sweatshirt sat next to his teenage brother near the front. After the service I got to share my list with him and told him that he was the treasure Jesus told me about before he ever arrived at church. He seemed unaffected when I prayed, but later his mom said he became emotional over the word and came up to give me a big hug. We can't always go by what we see. We just have to trust that Jesus is doing what He wants to do in the lives He directs us to.
There was more fun that happened during the evening. I prayed over a woman who was crying as she filled out a card with prayer requests. I asked if I could pray over her while she wrote. The prayer was generic, but at the end I felt Holy Spirit to call her, "A lighthouse on a hill, a beacon that others would see and come to." She began to laugh so I stopped praying. She said, "You said God 'sees' me, then you called me a lighthouse on a hill. That's the church I go to and 'beacons' are what the women are called at the church. You would have no way of knowing that, but God does and He Sees Me!" My husband and I prayed over a worship singer who was dealing with chronic back pain. Nothing seemed to change until he said that the pain was caused by his feet, legs and hips. Jeff asked if one of his legs was shorter than the other. He said, "Yes!" We sat him in a chair and gently pulled his legs out straight to measure them. His heals seems to line up, but his ankles were about an inch off. I placed my fingers on his ankle bones and Jeff began to pray. We watched as Jesus moved his ankles to line up right before our eyes. The man said, "Something's happening!" Sure enough, something did.
These are the things that follow those who believe (Mark 16:17-18). These are the things that happened with a tiny group of believers last night. Imagine the seeds handed out to all those Jesus touched. Seeds that will grow miracles of their own, fruit which will be produced by Holy Spirit and paths created which will lead people back to a good, good Father.
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