Last week one of the LAUP interns, Nathaly, stood up and shared how she has been taking risks to pray for people’s physical healing. She shared about a man at Door of Hope who has a job at an auto shop. As he was working last week, he slipped and hit his mouth on a wheel rim, giving him a small gash on his upper lip. When Nathaly offered to pray for him, he gladly accepted. After a few minutes of praying for him, she checked in to see if anything was happening. “Keep praying,” he said with passionate focus, “I feel my lip getting hot and tingling!” Nathaly kept praying. A few minutes later, she checked in again…to find the gash in his lip healed and gone!
This is just one of the twenty physical healings that have happened through students praying for people this summer! Students have also brought the power of God to liberate urban youth from psychological and spiritual oppression—seeing some of the worst-behaved kids change become peaceful and eager to learn—and have recognized the power they can bring for personal and community transformation. Students are living in the reality of God’s power and presence in our world, and they’re loving it!
I believe God is giving these students this experience not just to empower them that they can bring real healing and change to our world, but also to change them and shape their futures. My deepest hope and sense is that God is shaping them to let the purposes of his kingdom permanently transform their lifestyles, relationships, and careers.
But there are hundreds of factors working against that transformation. In less than a week, students will finish LAUP and go home to their families, head back into jobs, and head back to campus. If the experiences and lessons of the summer don’t become rooted in students’ hearts and minds, if they don’t take in the bigger-picture of WHY God has given them this summer, the power of God during LAUP could become nothing more than a fond memory.
These students and their leaders need your prayers this week! If the attack of the enemy is in proportion to the significance of God’s work, by that rationale, these students will have spiritual attack coming at them in force this week and over the next several. Please pray with me and our directors’ team for God’s protection of these students, that they will see the enemy coming and resist him, and that the principles of the summer will take root deep within healthy soil of their hearts. I encourage you to pray, yourself, and welcome you to pass on this prayer request as far and wide as you would like.
These students are a potent force of good in our world right now…but the real goal is who they will become AFTER LAUP. Together we need to call upon God to finish and seal his work in them, and to release them into living as salt and light in our desperate world.
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