The Healing Love of Christ Ministry Newsletter 2004

This year 2004 started on a curious note. At the tail end of last year, I had ruptured my Achilles’ tendon playing squash. Although I believed, and the testing at the Surgery showed that the rupture was partial (or had been partially healed) since I drove myself home that night, I had my left leg plastered for eight weeks. It was all the way from toes to the groin for the first two weeks, which included the festive season. The degree of my mobility was severely curtailed, to say the least, and I had a lot of time for quiet reflection. Like Joseph’s period of misfortune, I have come to regard the first half of the year as a divinely structured interval, which God seized upon to do some long-needed overhaul of my spiritual systems. In many senses, I had ‘lost it’. During my many moments of enforced incarceration, God made me do a review of how he changed completely my modus operandi when He first hired me as His servant in December 1974. I had a very vivid revelation of an incandescently bright person of light (whom I understood to be Jesus Christ) and He made me kneel down. He daubed me ‘with a sword in His hand’ and, in spite of vigorous protests about my gross unworthiness, He announced, with a flourish, ‘arise, My servant’. There followed a period of several months, when He literally re-arranged my daily programmes-appointments, meetings, contacts, interests etc.     In fulfilment of Jn3:8 - ‘The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit’. Just as He did in early 1975, all my carefully arranged agenda was again systematically upset and impromptu events were structured in their place from January 2004 onwards. Nevertheless, on each occasion, His name was glorified because the Holy Spirit was allowed to take charge fully of all that I did. I began to see once again, how easy it is to be filled with the Holy Spirit and yet give Him little authority to run the show in our lives.    The enhanced input of the Holy Spirit in planning and running my daily affairs is transforming me and those things I am involved in.

My wife and I continue to minister to various categories of people daily. They come on the telephone, or visit physically. There are one-on –one individual ministrations, and there were groups of ladies, or youth or mixed prayer settings. We ministered to families and church groups. Healing and deliverance was with regard to physical, mental, spiritual problems as well as the healing of relationships (many Christian marriages have been threatened this year). We have found the witness of the early apostles in Acts 4:12. particularly true ‘Nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved’.

In our last newsletter, we had solicited for prayer for our new venture, which God thrust upon us. The little hamlet of Ring’s End has a chapel formerly used by the Methodist Church, but was handed to us for use by the New Life Church in October ’03. We had opened a daily drop-in centre there at the start. After I was put in plaster, however, we had to cut down to three meetings a week.

The centre is now open on Mondays from 6pm to 7pm for a prayer meeting; on Fridays from 6pm to 7:30pm for a Youth Meeting, at which parents are welcome; and a praise-worship meeting on Sundays from 6pm to 7pm. All this is in addition to the extended time of fellowship and worship at our home on Sunday mornings from 10. 30am. to about 1pm. It was very encouraging to hear the testimonies the representatives of the Healing Love of Christ Fellowship gave to Pastor Mike Forrest of what God has done at Ring’s End since we started. They mentioned transformed lives, conversions, healing etc. Glory be to God in the Highest.

Of the three trips that were planned earlier in the year, to preach and teach and generally minister abroad, none actually came to be, because God over-ruled. One was to have been in Georgia, one in Milan, Italy and one in Malawi, Africa. In retrospect, God’s judgement was impeccable, as usual, since none of them would have been cost-effective or fruitful to any extent. However, God miraculously opened up an outing for ministry, for which God used Lewis Elves to prophesy, initiate and promote. It made use of a Fly-to-America-free promotion offer. At first, there was no room for me and then, quite suddenly, for only £92 (Airport Tax and Travel Insurance) I was able to visit Amherst, Massachusetts, Hartford, Connecticut and minister in two churches in the State of Maine. In Amherst, I was able to give marital counselling to my youngest son, Bode, who had recently got married to Bimbo, and fellowship with their Christian friends. The main ministrations, however, were in Wesleyan Church in Presque Isle, Maine and the Pentecostal Church in the next town where Ayo, my second daughter, and her husband, Sanya, were both heavily involved in ministry. There were also a lot of sessions in their basement (where group and individual ministrations went on almost continuously while I was visiting) and these centred mainly on the work of the Holy Spirit and Healing. The whole trip lasted only eight days, from the 8^th of March to the 17^th of March, but it packed full of fruitful activity.

The younger dependent children have moved on. Elizabeth (17) has finished the first year of sixth form (AS level) and has coped reasonably well with living away from home. Rebekah has finished GCSE- had to put in a last-minute spurt to aim for her goals. Esther not only started secondary school education, but tasted one year in boarding school. Olusakin (Tilewa) is doing well with an all round development, which includes the spiritual segment. All the grandchildren have really taken huge strides. The most striking landmarks are to do with my first granddaughter, who is eighteen, and has finished levels. She is going to University and my first grandson has finished GCSE and is 16 years old. The grandchildren in the State of Maine, USA, adjusted to the move from New Mexico and are real high flyers. Apart from prayer needs related to these, please continue to remember the project at Ring’s End, which has gone on for nine months, as the Chapel is about to change its ownership.