We were blessed beyond measure last weekend when we hosted Steve and Christina Stewart of Impact Nations.

Impact Nations takes teams of people from wealthy countries such as Australia and take them to poor countries to minister healing and preach the gospel. A typical day on a Journey of Compassion, as they are called, might involve medical clinics in the day time and evangelism rallies at night. In many different settings, they pray for people to be healed and they are.

We were taught how to pray for healing and how to expect healing to happen, not because we are good but because God is good.

During the meetings we had several opportunities for people to receive healing. One person reported healing from Motor Neurone Disease, another improved peripheral vision.

The question that changes everything is very simple: “May I pray for you?” Those 5 words allow God to come into people’s lives who do not even think of God or of prayer, but recognise that they need help.

My highlight was going to a poor part of the town to knock on some doors. I normally hate that kind of thing, but somehow this seemed like fun. The assignment was to offer people a small bag of fruit- apples, oranges and mandarins- and then ask if we could pray with them. We talked with people and shared something of God’s love. Where people felt like their life was pretty good and they had nothing to pray about, we simply prayed God’s blessing on them.

What was amazing was there were no grumpy people. We had ten pairs of people armed with three bags of fruit and all reported positive responses. I think people are happy to be offered something simple and there was no attempt to coerce people to be “religious.”

We also had some people visiting from other parts of NSW, including Dee and Mark McAllister who do prophetic dance.