During my time in Peru with Overseas Missions, we spent a day on a tributary of the Amazon. We saw some cool animals (sloths, crocodiles, weird turtles, macaques, and more), swam in the river, and toward the end of the day we stopped by a village of the mostly-indigenous Bora people. Their chief, Walter, was quite the clever businessman, and their actual village was a 4-minute walk away, but they had created a model-village close to the river for tourists. It was late in the day so many of the villagers had left for home already, but because our local Peruvian contact knows the chief, they arranged for some of the villagers to remain behind to welcome us. What happened next was awesome.
First, Walter and his tribe welcomed us with a number of traditional dances of the Bora people, and afterward they showed us some of their tribal wares. The items were pretty cool, as they included jewelry made of porcupine quills, artwork, and more. I didn’t look at the artwork much though because we brought some gifts for the tribe, which I briefly explained to Chief Walter—we brought medicine.
One of the things that made this trip so fun was that so much of what we did was counter-culture to how life normally goes. Usually, Chief Walter does a presentation with his tribe and they are in a service-role to the tourists as a form of income. And while our team was honored to receive similar treatment (even better than usual if you consider they stayed late in order for us to see them), it is uncommon for the tourists to bring gifts for the tribe. We provided pain medications, vitamins for the children and pregnant women, and other medications that are both generally useful and not readily available in the jungle.
Because Walter and the tribe were largely believers already we didn’t preach to them, but we did make sure to pray for anyone with pain and injuries before we left. An elderly man came up for prayer who had lost much of the sensation and mobility in his arms after carrying a heavy load through the jungle. He fell and was injured and afterward he could no longer move or feel properly. While from a medical perspective I suspect he had some level of nerve impingement in his upper back, the fact is that this negatively impacted his quality of life. Until Jesus showed up, that is. One of our team, Shawn, prayed for him and he regained all range of motion and sensation and all the pain in his body left!
Then, my buddy Troy and I prayed for Chief Walter who had some kind of injury to his foot. Considering the 40-minute walk twice a day along with the multiples of dances they performed barefoot, I suspect he had plantar fasciitis or similar—but regardless of the condition, it meant that simply doing daily life was painful, much less his job as the village leader. Well we prayed and the pain left! Now, when healing the sick and injured it can be easy to pray, not test anything, and leave feeling like we have added a notch to our belt and witnessed God heal someone, but I’m not a fan of leaving things untested if there is a way to try it out. We began by having the Chief stomp his feet, which he was able to do without pain, so we took it to max-level. I asked him to jump up and down on it to really make sure he was healed. And He was, because Jesus still heals!!
Often, manifesting the Kingdom is as straightforward as being more engaged than people normally are, and other times it looks like gifts of medicine. In this case it looked like both of those and healing prayer—but however we release the Kingdom, the key is for us to just step out and do it! Faith looks like risk, but when we step out and risk something we create opportunities for God to show up and show off His immeasurable goodness and love.
