I’m literally flooded with emotions right now. I don’t know what to think—it is like my head is not on straight &/or I’ve been smacked across the back of my skull with a heavy, blunt object.
There is an old gentleman who runs a food shop / sidewalk eatery out of his house that pretty much every farang staff member at GES has gone to for who knows how long. His name is Sombat, and apparently he has been dealing with a rather serious gastrointestinal problem for many years. It had become so bad in the recent months that the doctors were telling him that they would have to perform surgery in order to fix whatever was wrong. The downside is that Sombat is well advanced in years—probably about 70 years old—and as far as surgery goes, the older you get, the less advantageous the risk of an operation becomes.
His pre-op screening was scheduled for Wednesday—yesterday. On Tuesday this past week, one of my fellow teachers, Matt, & I stopped and talked for a bit with Sombat after we had finished our meal. Matt asked if we could pray for him before he went to see the doctors the next day. Sombat, like the majority of
Wednesday came & went. Today, I just finished my meal at Sombat’s place, and after paying, I asked the man how his doctor’s appointment went. He told me, as best as he could with his limited English, that the doctors took a scope and looked up inside him from underneath & down from the top side for the problem. He told me that the doctors said the lesion in his “stomach” had sealed up, motioning with his hands by taking his pinkie finger and wrapping around it with his other hand, as if to seal off the tip from the rest of the finger. Instead of the surgery that the doctors had told him was going to be mandatory, they gave him some medicine to take & he was told to sleep a lot for the next month, until he went back for a final check-up.
He stopped, looked at me and said, “Your God. I believe it was your God that heal me.” There was a look on his face of unmistakeable joy and honesty that it would have been impossible for me to in any way think he had just been polite, trying to make the farang who prayed to his foreign God feel good for offering up “good hopes.”
I walked away surprised, overjoyed and completely taken away. I’ve pretty much been a basket case ever since. Here I am in
I find myself reaffirmed that God does listen; that prayer does work; that God does love; that God exists. Furthermore, I find myself horrified at how I’ve let my walk with God very much slip away, recounting the many adventures that we have had together in my life.
Then there was this man, a Buddhist, who had more faith in my God than me. A man who believes that a God who was not his own reached out and healed him. That takes faith; more faith than I can confess to ever having. God has always been mine—He’s always been “there”; a part of my existence. There hasn’t really ever been a leap to grasp Him for me, as fundamentally, my very life has been founded on Him from day one of my life. I grew up in a Christian home & decided to follow Jesus at a very young age, so in that respect, I’ve had it easy. On the other side, though, I’ve never been subjected to the “otherness” of God—having to reach out and take hold of a supernatural being & relate with him without really having a background to set that relationship. I haven’t had to decide to switch allegiances from one god to another or from one set of religions / spiritual beliefs to another. Yet, here is this man who credits this God, which wasn’t his own, for restoring his health.
Increase my faith, God. Increase my faith.
