Years ago on a trip to Costa Rica, as a team of young adults, we were serving in a very poor community called “Las Tablas.” Most of the week was spent excavating a site and wheelbarrowing mud down a dirt path. This was in preparation for a foundation to be poured to expand a ministry center. During the week we were constantly mocked by a man living adjacent to the facility. He would sit on his roof or hang out his window cussing at us in Spanish. Toward the end of the week, he was hanging out the second-floor window of his home, cursing us once again, and he fell about 20 feet. His fall, however, was slowed by a live electrical line that shocked him, and he ended up lying unconscious on a dirt path.
Our impulse was to run over to help, but our hosts stopped us and said, “don’t go over to him and pray for him, he is a bad man,” but Christ’s love compelled us, and we went and prayed anyway. After we laid hands on him, he revived to find the group that he had been mocking surrounding him in prayer. He was so surprised!
He was taken to the hospital, and our hosts were so moved that they actually left us and went to the hospital where they got to lead this young man to the Lord.
This changed everything! Our hosts started taking us to sick neighbors to pray for them. We saw one other significant miracle where a woman who had seen a doctor and had been laid out for three days with terrible abdominal pain was instantly healed and got up to wait on us. Her humble home, just a few doors down from our previously mocking man, become a place of glory. What started out as a scary moment turned into a series of testimonies, through which that local ministry said that they were never the same again! That was really true for all of us!
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