#29 Great Support From Mall Employees

    Seventeen people showed- up at Zion and another four joined us at Portage Place.  When the teams were formed I opted to join Kevin’s as I hadn’t been with him for almost 8 months.

    At one point I had engagements going on at 3 different Food Court tables all at the same time – last night the action was brisk at times.

    Our first encounter was with Mathew and Stephanie.  Apparently ,Mathew had just rescued Stephanie from a boyfriend who was abusing her.  She kept asking us for twoonies.  I asked her if she was hungry, and she said she was.  I gave her an A&W gift card, and explained to her it was worth $10.  She looked at it with a puzzled look, but continued to ask team members for money.  I then asked her if she needed prayer for anything, and she said she wanted prayer for the pain in her heart.  We prayed for her, and then Kevin offered to buy them a coffee.  On the way to Tim Horton’s Kevin engaged a table of 6 more First Nations folks, and he also offered to buy them some coffee.  One of them boldly said that do-nuts would also be nice.  While we were getting the coffee and do-nuts Mathew and Stephanie sat at a table.  They told one of our team members that they didn’t know what to do with the gift card, so I took Stephanie over to the A&W kiosk and explained to the employee that Stephanie had never used a gift card before, and she needed help.  The employee patiently walked her through the process, and patiently waited while she decided on what she wanted.  I haven’t always seen that kind of care from food court operators.  At the end of the evening, I discovered that at least one other team ministered prayer to this couple.

     As I was returning to the table of 6, Gaylene came to tell me that Sharlene, a First Nations lady had just been in some sort of altercation, and she had an open cut on her hand.  She was bleeding on the floor, table, and her clothing.  One of the team members asked her if we could pray for her, and she broke into an angry tirade of bad language. “No effing way could we pray”, she stated.  She had no effing use for Jesus Christ because He had taken her child away from her.   She was adamant and the foul language rolled out of her mouth.  Gaylene and Iris were undeterred and Iris just put her arm around her, and told her that God loved her, and after a few moments, she allowed Iris and Gaylene to pray for her, as she poured out the pain in her heart.  Right after they prayed two security guards, who had been looking for her, showed-up to remove Sharlene from the mall.  When they saw that she was so peaceful and that she was being prayed for, they decided to let her stay, and one of them even got a bandage for her cut.  Portage Place can be a challenge for security, and they often don’t allow their hearts to get in the way of their job.  Tonight was an exception.

     As I returned to the table of 6, where Kevin and the team had been visiting while they ate their donuts.  Kevin then asked if anyone needed prayer.  One of them had a prosthetic leg and he said he had a lot of pain where the prosthesis joined his leg.  He pulled up his pant leg and Candice prayed for all pain to be gone.  He said it had improved, and so she prayed again, and I think he said it was good.  He was hard to understand, but he seemed very satisfied.

     After that, we roamed the first and second floor of the mall but didn’t have any significant encounters until Kevin approached a couple near the main front doors.  During the encounter, he asked if either of them had any difficulty with their eye site.  They both responded that they didn’t, but I noticed a young woman, with only one arm, about 10 feet from us, put up her hand part way.  I pointed her out to Kevin, and we engaged her but had the other couple stay with us to watch.  The girl’s name was Cherise, and she said she had a blurry eye site, even with glasses, and her left eye was worse than the other.  We asked the lady of the couple to hold Cherise’s glasses and coffee as we prayed.  Kevin prayed for her left eye and it went from a 4 out of 10 to a 7 out of 10, and she said the two eyes were now equal.  Right at that moment, Iris from another team walked up to us, so Kevin said that Iris could pray for both of her eyes.  Iris prayed twice and her eyes went from blurry to clear.  She put her glasses back on and told us that with her glasses everything was blurry again, so she took them off.  Then she said her eyesight was switching back and forth from blurry to good.  Kevin then had a word of knowledge and asked her if she was having some sort of struggle in her life.  She said she was, but didn’t want to say what it was.  Kevin then prayed again for her eyes, and told her we were going to leave her so she could talk to Iris about her difficulty.  When we left she had normal vision (without glasses) in both her eyes.

      The lady holding the coffee and glasses handed them to me and said she had to get out of there.  I asked if she was all right.  She said she wanted to get out of there before she lost her eyesight.  We tried to assure her that wasn’t going to happen, that we prayed only for healing, but she hurried away.  In hindsight, I think the devil was whispering threats to her.

     Iris spent a long time talking to Cherise.  She told Iris that she was supposed to have entered a detox program that day but she didn’t go.  She knew her mother, who was a Christian, would be very disappointed, and she was struggling with remorse.  She also told Iris that she had been clean until she recently had a relationship go bad, and that resulted in her taking drugs again.  She also asked Iris to phone her mother and tell her she was all right.  She said that whenever Iris placed her hand on her to pray that she experienced some kind of power that made her think she was going to fall down.  Iris explained that was the power of the Holy Spirit.  Cherise said she had heard of that but had never experienced it before.  Iris just loved on her and prayed for her.  Iris was the exact right person to minister to her and came along at just the right time.

      At 9:30 when I was leaving the mall I saw Cherise, her countenance was greatly changed, and she wasn’t wearing any glasses.  It would be great to know how that situation turns out.

     Just as Kevin, our team and I were leaving Iris with Cherise, Shannon, a homeless person, walked in the door.  I hadn’t seen her for months.  I greeted her warmly.  I was relieved she wasn’t the person who had frozen to death 3 weeks ago.  Shannon is an interesting character.  We don’t know if she is a man dressed as a woman or a woman with facial hair.  She preaches the Gospel and sings hymns to anyone who will listen.  The first thing she tells us is that she hasn’t been around because somebody has stolen her bus pass – which is a possibility but every time I have seen her she has the same story.  I think that is her ‘schtick’- her come-on to get hand-outs.  I gave her a $10 A&W card, someone else gave her some cash, and at the end of the evening I found out that other team members had also given her cash.  I think she scored big from several people last night.

      Other than a brief interlude it was an action-packed night.  What a thrill to see Cherise’s eyes healed.  What a privilege to watch Iris love people out of despair, and minister to the pain in their heart.

Future teaching by Kevin, Erin, Tom, and Lorraine.