Jane

Jane is the sister of someone I work with at ECM. She is 16 and we found out yesterday that she was in the hospital for the 3rd time in about two weeks, but still with no idea what was wrong.

So all of ECM staff (8 of us) went to the hospital this morning to visit Jane and her family and to bring some rice and sugar (the hospitals don’t provide food here, so someone has to stay with the patient and cook for them).

We got there to find Jane crying, unwilling to make eye contact, unable to talk, having serious headaches, and with her hands almost completely paralyzed (especially the right hand – she tried to squeeze our hands and just could not). The almost immediate reaction of all the women there (Chrissy, Mary, Christine, and myself) was that this was not just a physical sickness.

So Mary, Chrissy, and I sit down with Jane and ask everyone else to leave. We start asking questions, beginning with yes-no questions that don’t require a spoken answer. I was sitting next to Jane and had one arm around her shoulders and the other hand rubbing her arm. She was completely rigid.

As we continued to ask questions, it became very clear that her dad was somehow involved in what she was experiencing. We were all thinking sexual abuse, but Jane kept bringing up that he wouldn’t pay her school fees.

Then she started talking about her father’s third wife. I don’t know motive, but the woman recently did witchcraft on Jane while she was at school. Whatever she did was supposed to make Jane unable to talk. And it has been working. Until today. Jane has literally been experiencing physical symptoms from the witchcraft.

So we shared the Gospel of Jesus with Jane and then we began to pray. We prayed for the evil spirits surrounding her to flee, we prayed for physical healing, and we prayed that Jane would be set free from the feeling of abandonment she was feeling due to her father’s lack of attention and love (thus the reason she kept bringing up the fact that he won’t pay her school fees). We prayed in the name of Jesus.

And as we prayed, I felt Jane relax into my arms, I felt her hand begin to move, and I looked at her face and saw a huge smile!

After we had prayed, she still was unable to stand but was clearly doing substantially better. So I was sitting with Jane and talking (she speaks English!) and I suddenly felt like I should ask her to squeeze my hand again. So I asked and she squeezed so hard that it hurt. Then I asked if she wanted to get up and walk and she said, “Yes! Where do you want to go?” So Jane and I walked around the hospital ward.

She was discharged this afternoon and her brother called tonight to say that she was doing even better than when we left this morning.

There are lots of crazy things I’ve seen here, but I think this one wins the most awesome award. All I can really say is Jesus is so cool, so powerful, so faithful, and so good!