When the hand of God moves through ordinary people to touch the life of another something extraordinary happens. The natural becomes supernatural and hearts are forever changed.

*Vama wanted to know why her pain had returned. God healed her once before. Now, the pain was back.

“She was still praising God,” Bekah said. “She still loves Him and trusts Him. She just couldn’t understand why the pain had returned.”

Bekah had come with the Southeastern team to teach piano lessons in a Mumbai village. While she was teaching, Vama came in and sat down. She didn’t say a word, Bekah remembered. She just sat and watched for a long time.

After a few minutes, Bekah asked if she had come to study piano. “No,” the woman said. Just to be safe, Bekah repeated her question several more times, phrasing it differently each time to make sure the woman understood. Each time, the woman said, “No.”

Finally, Vama said to Bekah, “I used to have a terrible pain in my arm. I prayed and prayed to God and He took that pain away, and I praised His name.”

“About a month ago the pain came back,” continued Vama, who had recently been hospitalized for the problem. “I still praise God. I still trust Him. I still love Him, and I still have faith in Him. But the pain is back, and I can’t move my arm … I want to know why He let it come back.”

Moved by Vama’s story, Bekah left the keyboard and sat down beside her. With the help of her students, Bekah and Vama talked for some time. The woman asked for prayer. Bekah thought the woman might need to understand that God doesn’t always answer our prayers exactly the way we expect Him to.  She told Vama that God is powerful, that He healed her before and that He had the power and ability to heal her again.

“Maybe, though,” Bekah said, “there is a reason that your pain has returned.”

Bekah talked more about God’s faithfulness and shared Scripture from Deuteronomy 8.

“Maybe,” Bekah said, “this is a time that you can show your faithfulness to God.”

Vama agreed and said that she would continue to praise God.

Then Bekah, her students, and other members of the Southeastern team gathered around Vama to pray. They prayed for God’s will to be done, and they prayed for healing and for peace.

As the prayer ended and the students returned to their lessons, Vama raised her afflicted hand, shouting “Praise the Lord!”

Vama could move her arm again, when moments before she was unable to do so.

“I have the best picture of her giving us all a high-five,” Bekah marveled.

*Names changed

Angry.

Meena is angry, angry with God, wondering why He’s allowed such hardship in her life. Her husband left her three years ago, and life has been anything but easy.

“I cannot believe because of that,” Meena tells the women in the room. “Pray for me,” she asks.

We are hours away from the hustle and bustle of central Mumbai. The home we sit in is where Neha,* our translator, wants to put into practice the training she has received. For the past three days, Southeastern students have taught her how to share her testimony and stories from the Bible.

Heartbreaking.

Tears stream down Neha’s face as she continues to tell the stories the women are sharing.

Neha shares the story of the young woman sitting in the back of the small, poorly lit room, breast-feeding her child. Her husband beats her and drinks and gambles away their money, she says. As the young woman gently rocks her child, Neha tell us, “This woman was forced to marry a family member.”

A hush falls across the room. Then another woman begins to share her story.

“I pray, and my husband beats me. He beats me, but I still came today,” the woman explains.

Another woman, perhaps in her 30’s, chimes in, “I want to be baptized, but my family will not accept me.”

Stories of beatings, sickness and healing pour from the lips of the women.

“I felt all alone. I had no hope,” Pushpa* says. Raising her hands to gesture praises, she shares, “I thought I was going to die, but Christ healed me.”

“I believe Jesus Christ is the only God,” Pushpa says.

Hope.

As she cries, Rachel, a Southeastern team member smiles, nods and says, “Hope in eternity.” Rachel shares her personal testimony of hardships and encourages the women in the room to trust Jesus, even in hard times.

Then we take turns praying for the women.

Walking back to the main road to catch an auto rickshaw home, Neha turns to me and asks, “Are you happy?” Before I can answer, Neha says, “I am very happy. Today I talked about Jesus.”

*Names changed.

Even though she had trusted Christ for only less than one week, Ranee had already been sharing the life-changing Gospel with her family. Her sister-in-law, *Divia joined us and wanted to know more about this Jesus who had changed Ranee’s life.

Ranee had called up her brother and Divia the day she trusted Christ. It was God’s perfect timing. Facing financial and emotional hardships, Divia and her husband were planning on committing suicide together.

David shared the beautiful story of salvation with Divia and immediately, she decided to become a follower of Jesus. It was an incredible sound, hearing Ranee lead her own sister-in-law in a prayer of repentance, trust and much needed hope in Jesus.

After Divia had trusted Christ as her Savior, David told the group of women about the need for obedience in baptism. From the look on Ranee’s face, I could tell she knew it was important, but lacked the exuberance to follow, which she had shown previously.

The pastor turned to me and told me to pray. With faces turned to the floor, I prayed in earnest that God would reveal Himself to these women, would solidify their relationships with Him in their hearts, and would make real their decisions to follow Him whole-heartedly. The pastor decided not to translate my prayer.

As I was praying, I was envisioning a series of everyday circumstances these women would face in the next few days, trusting that God would reaffirm their decisions in small, quiet moments. That’s when God blew the roof off my thinking.

Ranee stood after the prayer and faced me, speaking quickly in Marathi. Her large eyes looked past me and stared out the window behind me, as tablespoon-sized tears poured down her face. The Indian pastor was listening to what she was saying and simply saying, “Alleluia! Praise Christ!” We waited for what seemed like a few minutes to hear what she had been so passionate to share.

The pastor turned to me saying, “This woman saw a vision of Jesus as you were praying. Before you began, she thought she was too sinful to receive the baptism David spoke of earlier.” With Ranee still standing reverently, tears dripping from her chin, he continued, “But while you were praying, she had a vision of Jesus, dressed in white robes. Jesus told her, ‘No, Ranee. This baptism is also for you. I have forgiven all your sins.’”

Needless to say, everyone in the room was blown away. Through translation, Ranee confessed that she was the Samaritan woman at the well. Though she had been married before, her husband left her, and the man she was living with now was not her husband.

This woman stood there, pouring out her heart full of pain and accepting the cleansing love of Jesus Christ. She has no doubt in her mind; she is ready to be baptized. She couldn’t understand my prayers in English, but God answered them in a way she could.

Never again will I pray for the sake of praying. Never again will I try to fit God’s movement in an understandable box. When I was praying in that upstairs room yesterday, I did believe that God could do the things I asked of Him. I just wasn’t ready for the answer to be immediate.

*Names changed.

David and the rest of the Brook Hills team are an easygoing crew, so traveling to Mumbai, India to share the gospel in the slums hasn’t caused a lot of stress.

In fact, when Pastor *Lomash showed up that first day on this motorbike to take David across town, David was cool with it. He just didn’t know how – or where – to hold on.

“You don’t have to hold on,” Pastor *Lomash said. “Just balance yourself.”

With that, they took off.

As the pastor sped through the streets and highways, David took in the scenes around him. Mumbai is home to nearly twenty million people. Its buildings run the gamut from high-rise, modern office complexes to lean-to shelters with plastic coverings. Transportation ranges from luxury vehicles to crowded buses to motorcycles and the ever-popular rickshaw.

“We took a 45-minute ride on that bike through the city,” David said. “I kept thinking, ‘Here I am in Mumbai surrounded by close to twenty million people without Christ.’”

As the masses flashed by, it wasn’t the crowds that David noticed most. It was the individual faces.

“I could see the faces of people everywhere,” David said, “and I just started praying for them.”

Later, after the motorbike ride and his walk through the slums, David talked about being confronted by the enormous physical and spiritual needs.

“I was overwhelmed by the urgent need on the ride through the city,” David recalled, “… and then I got to see the gospel hope in some of the homes we visited.”

Three of the people that David visited are new believers who were just baptized last week.

“There were these new believers and the joy that Pastor Lomash had. I just got to see the gospel hope in that slum,” David concluded.

Gospel hope. That’s what it’s all about.

*Names changed