Even Pastors Need Healing

Amazonian Wednesdays 🌴

July 2003
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“Pastora Jennifer, would you minister to me next time you come to teach?” The question surprised me, coming from a seasoned jungle pastor who has started around twenty churches in villages upriver from our city.

The person making the request was Pastora Isabela, the current administrator of our missions school. She has been in ministry for over fifteen years, single handedly starting and overseeing churches in San Fernando, the jungle district where she was born. Her vision is to see churches planted in all 142 villages of that area. She is a mighty prayer warrior, up before dawn every morning bringing in the day immersed in the presence of God. Whenever I have a serious circumstance warranting concentrated, effective intercession, she is the first one I look up!

And now she was asking me, a relatively new missionary not yet thirty years old, to pray over her! I have to admit, I was humbled and just a little intimidated. But I promised to do so the next time I saw her.

What prompted Pastora Isabela’s request was her observation of the class that I have been teaching at the missions school on the healing of emotional wounds through the power of the Holy Spirit. She had been following the sessions with great interest, and had become convinced through her personal prayer time that she needed to receive what I was teaching about.

When the day arrived, Isabela was ready. We sat down and she began to tell me about an issue of fear in her life that went back to the days when she had recently given her life to Jesus. A group of malicious men came to her village, where she ran a little store out of her home. They went into her bedroom at night, grabbed her clothing tightly at her throat, and with a pistol to her head, demanded that she give them all her money. After she did so, they were getting ready to kill her. However, for some “unexplainable” reason, they let her go at the last minute and left.

As we revisited this memory, Isabela saw a vision of the light of Jesus filling the scene. She now received the heart revelation that He had been there, even though she had not been aware of His presence. The light drove her terror away, and she was filled with a tremendous peace. She exclaimed with joy , “The fear is gone!” With her eyes still closed, she smiled sweetly as the Holy Spirit spoke to her, “Arise, shine, for your light has come!”

Perfect love had indeed cast out all fear.