The Lord worked powerfully at Crossroads Community Church in Arkansas City, KS this past weekend. I was there to lead a women's retreat. As I drove across the long stretches of prairie to get there last Thursday, I asked the Spirit to give me any words of knowledge He wanted to impart regarding the women who would be attending. Suddenly I saw a picture of an elbow.
"An elbow, Lord?" I exclaimed! I've received many words/visions of knowledge when God wanted to heal, but I confess I've never seen an elbow before! He went on and spoke to me about a severe ear infection, a painful hip, and the word "hepatitis." I wrote them all down on a piece of paper stuck in my purse at a Kansas rest stop.
The Lord was, of course, true to His word. A woman with osteo-arthritis felt the pain in her hip leave at the beginning of the retreat, and it never returned. Another woman who has been battling ear infections for about six months experienced a healing also. One woman there has two adopted children whose birth mother has heptatitis, and she has been on her knees praying against this disease in her two little ones! Together we prayed with the mama and rejoiced that the Father brought her this word of assurance that the babies are healed of this disease.
But what of the elbow? It turns out a lovely blonde woman had been suffering with severe tendonitis in her elbow for many months. She had not told anyone. She was sobbing as I prayed for her on Saturday, and the pain in her elbow began to subside. But I couldn't help but wonder why she seemed so disturbed emotionally about this elbow.
In a prayer and praise service I led on Sunday evening, I found out why. The reason she had not told anyone about her elbow was that this painful condition had commenced after she had been most unkind to a person in her church, and had eventually (she felt) "driven her out of their church." As her guilt and shame grew worse over this person she had wronged, so did the pain in her elbow.
On Saturday the Lord let her know, through the word given to me, that He knew about the pain in her elbow and was going to heal it. Then on Sunday morning, with no communication whatsoever between them for many months, the woman she had wronged showed up in church! There was repentance - there was forgiveness - and God brought a full-circle healing, from the elbow to the heart! He reached into my car on a sunlit Kansas road and showed me a picture of an elbow - and that began a chain of events that healed a woman from the inside out - and restored a friendship.
A heart at peace gives live to the body; but envy rots the bones (Proverbs 14:30)
