Miracles in Lebanon

While I visited a community center for Syrian refugees near the Syrian border in Lebanon we were asked by our host to deliver a wheelchair to a Syrian muslim family whose 17 year-old son had been paralyzed from the waist down for 6 years.  The Syrian refugee who took us to the house was the boy's cousin.  On the way, he told me that he had begun reading and memorizing the Bible in Arabic for a week and that every night since he began reading he had been having spiritual dreams about following Jesus.  

A team of 3 were with me for this visit.  One of them had been healed of paralysis himself so we thought it would be great to have him share his miraculous testimony and to help us pray with the teenager.  When we walked into the home, the boy was lying in a corner looking almost comatose.  So we explained to his muslim mother what we wanted to do.  He shared his testimony and I translated as the only Arabic speaker on our team.  We asked if we could pray for her son who name was Abed and she agreed.  We were heading into quite a spiritual battle.  While praying for the boy, he lost his sight for a few minutes but then through prayer he regained it.  We continued to pray and he started to feel tingling in his feet – for the first time in 6 years!  This encouraged us because this was exactly the way God restored our team member's ability to walk.  Little by little the sensation of feeling returned to his legs, moving upward to his waist.  He told us that he wanted to walk but that he knew it wasn't possible.  He felt like trying though.  So two of our team lifted Abed up and supporting him they had him stand.  For several years he hadn't been able to stand at all and now he was standing!  The next thing was they helped him to walk around the room.  They sat him down on the couch which he also hadn't been able to do, to sit up.  

Abed also had had no appetite and had to be fed by his mother.  He was literally skin and bones.  We prayed that God would restore his hunger and a few minutes later the mother brought in food for all of us and her son ate 3 sandwiches, feeding himself for the first time in years!  He was smiling, talking – a totally different person than the teenager we met when we walked in the house.  He then told us that he was deaf in his left ear.  So we prayed for God to restore his hearing and his deaf ear opened!  We were shocked, stunned, overwhelmed and thrilled all at once.  It was hard to believe what we were witnessing God do in this Syrian refugee family!  All throughout the time, I was sharing the Gospel with this family and the cousin.  

So when we left, Abed could stand, walk with assistance, feed himself and could hear out of his previously deaf ear.  We knew that God who had begun a good work, would be faithful to complete it.  We also know that the cousin will soon be follower of Jesus Himself.  He witnessed the power of the God whose Scriptures he is now memorizing.  This was undoubtedly one of the most special days of ministry I have ever had in my 27 years of ministry in the Middle East.  Pray for Abed and his family.