On April 9th, 2016, I believe I was part of the biggest beginnings of a revival America's ever seen. Azusa Now hosted about 115,000 registered guests in the LA Memorial Coliseum and roughly 2,000 BSSM students were part of the ministry team (which included this little goober)!
Four days before the event, the BSSM students flooded every zone in LA to pour out God's love and miraculous power on people. We all shared crazy testimonies that God was doing via a facebook page (you can read every testimony that happened here!), including people walking out of wheelchairs and blind eyes opening and deaf people hearing for the first time in their lives--all across LA!
Every day I would read these testimonies, sometimes first thing in the morning and I would cry because it was so overwhelming that God was touching people--Christians and unbelievers alike. But most of all, I had never seen a healing like that before with my own eyes, and by my own hands.
Those four days prior to the event were both awesome, exhausting and intense.
Day one, we ministered around Union Station and the jails, and visited the USC Campus (freaking gorgeous). The church there had been fasting and interceding for Azusa for months already. They were on fire, and after churning the flame, we set out to minister to students. Tons of them got saved, and I found myself loitering around a food court looking for a chance to share Jesus with someone. Sure enough, I ended up speaking with an agnostic girl my own age who didn't believe in God because of prior religious circumstances. This was the first time I ever prayed for someone to feel Jesus--and she did!
Day two, we hit the streets of Skid Row--one of the largest homeless avenues in the nation. This was the first time I ever evangelized to the homeless, and it certainly wasn't a neat business. People reeked of urine and drugs, and most of them we talked to weren't even socially capable of maintaining a normal conversation. But I went for it anyway! One instance, a teammate told me to prophesy over a man using one of his tattoos. I got this, I thought, as I asked the man to pick any tattoo (he had several). Sure enough, he picked the one with the grim reaper holding a nude woman. I do not got this, I thought, but asked God for interpretation anyway. He could use anything to convey a message, right? Yes! So, I began telling the homeless man that there is beauty in death because there is heaven on the other side, and I started pulling out the gold in him and all that wonderful stuff (Thank you sweet Jesus).
Day Three, we evangelized around the Farmer's Market in Downtown LA. Now I'm going to be honest: At this point, I was physically exhausted. My feet hurt from walking so much and I wanted to sleep longer than 6 hours. My teammates and I weren't really getting anywhere with ministering to people, at least compared to what we had seen the last two days, and we were beginning to feel divided. THUS, we prayed and became honest with each other about how we were feeling. I felt that I had to push myself to evangelize, to share about Jesus, and it sucked. But after we were honest and talked to our leader, we made optional arrangements to take it easy the rest of the day. It was then that the pressure of evangelizing left me and I actually started doing it naturally the rest of the afternoon!
Teamwork is what God's family business looks like.
Day Four, after getting plenty of rest, we packed bags of goodies and set out for Ramona Gardens, a housing district that had low income and was in need of ministry. I was pumped now; I just knew God was gunna do something awesome! My teammates and I ventured about until we came across a group of kids that would probably be in junior high. Long story short, they didn't know the gospel very well and after two hours of loving on them (and eating like 4 bags of snacks), they gave their lives to Jesus! *shoots fireworks*
But I was still in search for seeing a healing miracle! So later that evening we had ministry outside the LA Memorial Coliseum, the day before Azusa Now. I ended up walking around with one of my closest BSSM friends, finding ourselves praying for people. There was a woman who had sprained her ankle in January and felt severe pain since then, so one of my teammates asked me to pray for her. I don't know if anything will happen, is what I thought. But I will try. So I put my hand on her, super duper casually asked God to fetch a new ankle from heaven and put it in her foot, and then I asked the daunting question... "Do you feel anything?"
"Yes!" She shouted, "I feel heat!"
"Say WHAT?" I shouted back, asking God to increase whatever He was doing. By the end she was jumping around and feeling zero pain, and I was jumping around screaming that it had actually happened! God used little ol' Allison--your friendly neighborhood goober--to heal someone!!
For the rest of the trip, I felt my relationship with Jesus totally change from what it had been just a few days prior. Now I believed God could use me for amazing things, and more than just that: He wanted to.
This is just a brief outline of what my missions trip was like! The next part will be about Azusa, and my adventure through Disneyland for the first time, because Jesus was with me there, too!
Nonetheless, if there's one thing I want you, my wonderful reader, to take away from all this is just the one thing: God wants to use you, anywhere, anytime, to bring a miracle to someone's life big or small. For freaking real.
And that, that is surely the finest life to ever have!
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