Last night, I prayed for three people and none of them got healed.

(This may not be a surprise for you but for me, it was so surprising that I wrote a blog about it. 🤣)

Three Times I Wondered Why

One was a homeless man who had some significant confusion in his mind stemming from spiritual oppression. He came up to us and asked me and my husband for change. We prayed for him and gave him $10. Despite getting a little bit of freedom from spiritual oppression, he did not get saved and he did not get healed. He just thanked us and went on his way.

The second was a different homeless man who had no sense of day or night, left or right. He was so severely mentally ill that he spoke loudly and softly to himself, made gestures in the air, and had a hard time recalling or saying his name. He had no shoes and his toenails were half an inch long. He was covered in filth. My husband and I approached him to offer prayer. He said “no” but we realized he didn’t understand what we were offering, so we prayed for him from a distance so as not to scare him. Then, he began to walk away before we were done. God told us to follow him and pray some more, which we did. Unfortunately, we couldn’t see or feel any change in the spiritual realm or the natural realm. We stopped when we felt God tell us to stop.

The third person was a teenager walking down the street with (I assume) her mother and grandmother. She was walking with a crutch and was very thin. God told me to offer her prayer, which she accepted. She had spinobifida and couldn’t walk with a straight gait. I prayed for her for ten minutes and though she felt the tingles of the Holy Spirit all over her body, she didn’t experience any healing while we were there.

Lessons From My Failures

Honestly, I felt discouraged, but here are five things I did NOT do as a result:

1. I didn’t conclude that it must be God’s will that they remain as they are. That would make God a pretty cruel parent. It would also invalidate God’s character as presented by Yeshua and the Bible. I clung to the 1 Timothy 2:3-4 that God desires all people to be made-whole (healed/saved/delivered) and to come to an experiential knowing of the life-giving truth. (Too many translators have limited the power of this scripture to just salvation…but that’s not what the Bible says!)
2. I didn’t conclude that I don’t have the spiritual gift of healing and give up trying to grow. Did Yeshua’s disciples know how to heal people as soon as they began to follow him? No. Did they fail to heal people at times even after they began to be able to heal people? Absolutely. If Yeshua taught them to persevere despite failure, then I have the same call.
3. I didn’t blame them for not getting healed. I didn’t conclude that they must have sinned for them to be in such a poor shape. I didn’t assume they wanted to stay as they are. I didn’t accuse them of not having enough faith. Those would have been the opposite of loving and, hence, the opposite of godly.
4. I didn’t build a theology to explain my powerlessness. Hear me: I stuck to the example of Yeshua and his disciples in the Bible. I didn’t conclude that if I don’t see people healed, then the spiritual gift of healing is no longer available for people like me who have the Bible, have doctors, have science, or anything else. I owned my responsibility to keep learning, and trying and growing—just as God tells me to do—until I get a breakthrough and am able to heal as Yeshua did and greater.

What I DID do is go back to God in prayer and ask why they didn’t get healed. I heard God say, “This is how you grow in healing. You keep trying until it works.” And so I shall.