I know it’s really bad form to start a series called Testimony Thursday on a Sunday, but these stories really did happen on Thursday and I just haven’t been able to get online since then. I did write this up on Friday morning, though, and I expect to usually be able to post regularly on Thursday nights. So there.

As I said in my last blog, we’ve started doing outreaches every Thursday afternoon on our day off. Yesterday about forty of us went to two malls to heal the sick, prophesy, and share the gospel. Within five minutes of getting out of the shuttle, still just standing in the parking lot, we saw the leg of one of our interns grow out and we prophesied over this random curious guy we met. And that was only the beginning.

Once inside the mall, my group almost immediately saw a woman wearing a blue dress with her ankle wrapped in a bandage, and two of the prophetic items on our lists were “blue” and “broken ankle.” We prayed for her and the man she was with, and her ankle got HEALED! As we were praying I got a word that she has a mother’s heart—turns out that although she has no kids of her own, she’s been (as I understood it) a foster mom to many and the theme of mothering has marked her life for years. So I got to bless and encourage her in that. The man she was with had “irreparable” back pain, so we declared that nothing is irreparable with God and we are still believing for his healing.

We also met an Orthodox Jewish girl from Israel, a rapper whose baseball cap was on my list, two Muslim women I prayed for in JESUS’ name (even though I was more nervous than I’ve ever been), and a believer from West Africa with whom we had a great conversation throwing Scripture back and forth.  Some of our other groups saw a lot of healings and connected with a girl who is so hungry for God and they’re keeping in touch with her, and the group that our two leaders were in actually got escorted out of the mall!

That story was pretty crazy. As I remember it, they were praying/healing/prophesying over someone working at a kiosk, when one of the leaders recognised a girl walking by. After talking, they realised that he’d prayed for her leg to grow out (it did) the previous week at a different mall. At the leader’s encouragement, the girl told her two friends about it, and he was about to pray for healings for the two of them right there but they were asked to leave the store they were in. So he prayed for both girls outside the store, and one of the girls had her torn ACL healed, and as she was freaking out and jumping around, a security guard came to ask all three of our people who were there to leave the mall.

So as they were being escorted out, they started prophesying over the guard, who turned out to be a Catholic believer and theoretically supported evangelism but not in his mall. He believed he was obeying God by making them honour the authorities, etc. So our people shared some stuff from Acts with him about preaching the gospel anywhere and everywhere no matter how many times they get shut down. They encouraged him to boldly share the gospel even in his own workplace, and his theology was getting pretty blown up. He still made them leave, though, and so they went and healed/prophesied/prayed/preached in Target and Chik-Fil-A instead.

So that was my Thursday.