One of the things we did in Peru 2023 was to hold medical clinics. In fact, one of the things Overseas Missions has done on many of their trips is to hold medical clinics as an outreach method. We give people actual medical treatment to the extent we can, then we send everyone to our prayer team to get prayer, and, no exaggeration, almost everyone walks away healed. As the saying goes, people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. Taking time to meet people’s practical physical needs goes a long way to show that we care about people, which then creates an opportunity to minister God’s love to them. For us, this isn’t just notches in a belt where we can pat ourselves on the back and feel we “accomplished something for God.” In fact, this approach is one of the things I love about how Overseas Missions does things because it really is all about people and sharing God’s heart for them, not about being able to show a church group nice pictures after the fact to get more funding. It’s all about finding the gold in the dust—and God demonstrated that to me during our clinics in a unique manner.
As a nurse, I am quite happy to use my existing skills and training to help create ministry opportunities. Even if we didn’t do clinics I’d still go on these trips, but this is one way I can give back that not everyone is able to, and as an outreach method there is little that compares to it. I remember in 2018 I was in India on a similar trip and because we were doing these clinics we were visited by hundreds of locals who otherwise would have passed by but never stopped for prayer. After all, most residents of India believe in gods of some kind, so unless we do something unique they don’t really know why they should care about our God as compared to the ones they already follow. One woman from that trip even told a team member, “You have loved me more than my gods ever have.” That’s the God-kind of love and that’s what these trips are about. Now, back to the clinics.
Little about these clinics is glamorous. We have bags full of medicine and vitamins, some reference books, an extremely limited number of resources with which to assess patients, and we have our eyes, hands, and stethoscopes. We sit on plastic chairs, have our medicines laid out on dusty wooden tables and benches, and people make lines in literal dirt and dust to be seen. And yet, time and time again, every time I would look at people’s skin for rashes, parasites, fungal infections, or any other gnarly thing they needed help with, their skin always had gold dust all over it.
Every.
Single.
Time.
It was ridiculous.
This is how amazing God is and how He does things far differently than we do. God’s economy is not man’s economy.
Now, I didn’t check everyone’s skin, but for those I did, in the trash-filled, slummy, muddy, poor, dusty, dirty, overlooked area of Belen, Iquitos that we visited, all of them God had covered with His golden glory. It was really obvious too. The first one I saw was on a man who had this odd rash around his neck and shoulder area. He wasn’t the kind of guy who uses sparkly makeup and skin lotion either—he was a dude who lived in a poor area and wasn’t about to waste money on that kind of stuff, and certainly he wouldn’t use it as a treatment for a skin rash. It surprised me so much that I had the other nurse and our translator look at it as well. But it didn’t stop there, or with him. A kid with Ringworm? It was a kid with ringworm covered in a thin layer of gold dust. Unidentified rashes? They were unidentified and yet covered in a light dusting of golden glory.
The one that surprised me the most, and I tell this story in detail in this article, was the woman who had a tumor on her ankle, and the intensity of the gold dust on her tumor-covered ankle was the most of anyone I had seen the entire time we were there.
I will be meditating on this in the future to truly understand what God was saying and doing here because I don’t think I truly have grasped the depths of what He wants to show me in this particular way He manifested His presence. And I don’t say this because the gold dust miracle is new to me, because it isn’t. I will eventually publish, possibly even later this year, a book called Gold from Heaven that will discuss this miracle. But there is something specific and unique about this time and place that God chose to do it and I hope to gain better understanding of it. But for whatever the reason that God decided to show His glory off in this manner it was spectacular.
You see, I love this miracle, but I wasn’t asking for it. We had been praying for the sick and the injured to be healed all week long, not for gold dust to appear on their blemished skin. He WAS been healing almost everyone we prayed for, but this both delighted me and caught me off-guard because it seemed so pointless and was so beautiful all at the same time. Like I said before, God’s economy isn’t man’s economy and the way He does things is so different than our methods. We are always looking for some specific way that the miracle is going to “preach the gospel” and if we can’t point to how it gets people to say a sinner’s prayer or get miraculously healed or some such thing then we tend to reason that it can’t be God or that He must be confused somehow because we have ideas of what God really cares about and none of these unique miracles make the list. But God is interested in removing our limitation thinking, not operating inside of it just to keep us happy. Furthermore, God isn’t limited to either healing the sick or manifesting gold dust as detractors tend to think. No, the Creator of the entire cosmos who spoke creation into being with a single word is more than capable of doing both and tons more at the same time.
I was excited to see what God did at these clinics, through all of the Peru 2023 trip, and what He will continue to do in the future. He is continuing to teach us new things and transform our ideas of who He is and what He is like, I firmly believe that we must learn to experience His opulence in these kinds of ways, whether things like finding gold in the dust of poor slums that far outshine our idea of extravagance or in other ways that He chooses to reveal His goodness, there is one thing that is certain in all of this. Jesus is alive and He will stop at nothing to display His love and goodness to all of us!
