Bracelets and Butterflies pt.1

I stood up from our training class a little baffled. I’ve been a Christian for years, so how come I’ve never heard teaching how to share the gospel in general or in different people groups? We spent the afternoon practicing sharing the gospel with our team. I’ve told people about Jesus before and how he has changed my life, but my team was the first group of people ever to hear me share the gospel in depth. I was always told to share my faith, but never taught how. I was taught how to pray for people and how to pray for healing or prophetic words. I was taught how to speak in front of large groups of people and how to speak on a stage. Yet, I was never taught how to share the gospel practically. I know I should have sought it out before now, but I’m still just baffled.

I’m not a newbie in my faith, but I’m definitely a newbie at sharing the gospel. So you can imagine my bewilderment when my team and I got the news we would be walking the city and sharing the gospel with people. I instantly disqualified myself and let my team lead the way. No matter if I thought I was capable of sharing the gospel or not, the Holy Spirit was speaking to me about who I was about to share with.

Something I want to do on the race is collect one bracelet from each country we visit. That way, I always have a little reminder of all God did in each place on my wrist. Each time I went to get a bracelet here, it either wasn’t a good time, or I felt like I should wait for some reason. I then understood I would buy a bracelet that day and share the gospel with whoever was selling it.

We arrived at the park and saw it swarming with people bird watching, eating, spending time with their loved ones, and especially people walking around in colorful Guatemalan clothing trying to sell things to tourists. I was sure I would find the person I was supposed to talk to rather quickly, but instead of being approached with bracelets and headbands, I was approached over and over again by people trying to sell me magnets haha I wasn’t sure how to tell them I don’t even have a fridge. As I was walking around searching for this person, the Holy Spirit highlighted a woman in a wheelchair across the park. I frantically looked around me for one of my Spanish-speaking friends, but by the time I found one, the woman was gone.

I continued to walk around, kind of discouraged that I missed the woman I saw, when suddenly, out of nowhere, I heard a voice behind me. It was the woman in the wheelchair, extending a handful of bracelets to me. Immediately I grabbed my friend Raquel who is fluent in Spanish, and we sat and talked to our new friend, J. What started as her telling us how she made the bracelets became a conversation on how she came to sell them. She shared her story through shaky words and streaming tears, and the whole time I felt how badly Jesus wanted to rush into her life. I was naive to think the only way He could show her this was through healing. We prayed and prayed and prayed. We brought more of our friends in to lay hands and command healing. What must have been about an hour went by while praying fervently for J. Although she didn’t get up and walk as we had hoped, her legs that had no feeling in them before had regained feeling, and the pain in her body went away. J was overwhelmed with joy and asked us if she would see us around sometime. We told her we do our best to come back and see her before we left for Costa Rica, and at this, she smiled greatly, thanked us, and went about trying to sell more bracelets.

I don’t really remember walking home that evening. I just remember asking God a lot of questions as to why J didn’t get up and walk. He spoke so clearly to me and said, “Where you were looking for a miracle, I was looking for a conversation.” Yeah, that hit me like a brick. I was so busy looking at what God could do in the physical, God was looking for what He could do in her heart. How often do we miss what God wants to do because we are so set on it looking a specific way? I had to go back and give my friend the conversation she deserved and not some sort of agenda.

Make sure to subscribe to be notified when I post part two of this blog. You won’t want to miss what God did when I went back for our sweet friend J.