Fear Extinguishing - "You gave us hope to stand in our faith until now"

Yesterday was an incredible day. After a mandatory quarantine of 14 days, we were excited to be out, interacting with people freely and to see what God would do.  And the logical place to do that when it is over 110 °F (or 43.33 °C), is to head to one of the large malls.

Over the course of a few hours, we were able to once again pray for and minister to many people.  Here is one of those stories.

In my morning Bible reading, the Lord highlighted the verse that says Jesus "does what He sees the Father doing" (Jn 5:19).  I felt like the Lord was emphasizing that in our new outreaches, God wants us to rely even more on His prophetic guidance, leading as we go. And He led us 

Back in March and April, when we had been out fear extinguishing, our community ministered to hundreds and hundreds of people in cities/towns in this country. And so it wasn't surprising that in one of the first places we felt led to stop, the group working in this restaurant asked us, "Do you remember us?"  A couple of us back in March had ministered to a group at a restaurant in a different city, but they had been transferred to the mall. The way the Lord led us to them as we were seeking to "do what we sensed the Father was doing", is that I saw them wearing their face masks, face shields, and gloves and I FELT COMPASSION for how they must be feeling having to work like that - so restricted, so confining! So we went up and immediately we were able to start encouraging them. I shared my quick 3-point "Promise Sermon" if we are in Christ - protection, healing, & eternal life! And one of them said this about our visit 5 months earlier, "You gave us hope to stand in our faith until now"!  That simply made our day. If that was the only thing that had happened yesterday, it would have been more than enough. And it also encouraged us that those outreaches we were doing were, in fact, more valuable, more impactful than we thought at the time. Sometimes we had very quick interactions, sometimes only a minute or two when we were Fear Extinguishing. But yesterday, we discovered that one of those quick visits, one of those short prayer times, had indeed had a lasting impact. 

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