Hello! It’s Tina again. I was just dropping in to let you all know what I have been up to. Tulsa has been good. We just finished our first quarter and are now starting a new set of classes. At first I was really bummed that my favorite classes like Foundations of Faith were over, but after our first week of new classes I’m really excited about this quarter too!
One of my favorite things we did this last month was going on Faith Walk. Most of the ministry we do involves going to nursing homes, orphanages, relation centers, homeless shelters ect., but Faith Walk is something different. Faith Walk is a 20 year running IMT tradition. From the beginning Faith Walk was designed to build the IMT members faith by sticking groups of 4 or 5 out in the middle of nowhere with only a change of clothes, no money or food and a 6 foot wooden cross to carry. The team then had to have faith for a ride back to Tulsa as well as for food and a place to stay. This year they changed our goal to simply following where God called us to minister to people instead of looking for rides back to Tulsa.
I was in a group of two guys and one other girl. We got dropped off by a river in the country with our cross, clothes, and….that was about it. We all felt to go the same way so we started walking. We got a town called Wetumka after a couple of miles and were able to pray for a boy named Christian who had cancer, a girl at Dairy Queen who was scared to be moving out of her home, and a lady parked at Dairy Queen who had kidney problems. Feeling content to continue on we started down a highway into the country. After walking about an hour we started feeling really hungry. Suddenly I noticed some horses by the road, hanging out looking all awesome. Soon we were patting these horses under the shade of a pleasant little tree wondering when God was going to provide us food. The owner of the horses, a really friendly older lady came out and started talking to us. “If you really want to make these horses like you, you should feed them some of these pears from this pear tree.” Wouldn’t you know it, we were soon happily munching on pears as we continued on down the road thanking God for the lovely horse-pear-lady He had put in our path.
It was probably about a half hour and again we had another encounter with horses. A girl on a horse and her mom started yelling at us from their house as we were passing by. Apparently they were having a garage sale for their church and had sandwiches, chips, and sweet iced-tea. Soon we were having sandwiches, chips, and sweet iced-tea with them. After about an hour we were on the road again, our bags filled with pears, chips, and boston cream pies (?). We continued on for a couple more miles, taking naps along the way until we came across a lady mowing her lawn. We prayed with her as we had all the other stops along the way, and she recommended we stop at a church a little further up the road and meet the pastor there. Feeling encouraged that we had a destination we made our way towards this church. As it was getting later in the day we were very convinced that this pastor would invite us in like his own children, cook us food, give us a place to stay, tuck us in and sing us lullabies as we drifted off into a sleep filled with unicorns and rainbows. That wasn’t the case. After spending about two hours at his church awkwardly waiting for him to offer us these things (we weren’t allowed to ask people for anything) as he gave us a tour, the most we could swindle from him was some chips and a ride to the closest town.
So there we were, at about 9 pm wandering our way around this unknown town waiting to see what God had planned for us. We had a lovely little supper of pears, apples (a car stopped and gave us even more food and drinks on our walk), and chips and were able to pray with a guy who needed a job as we were eating. Feeling directionless we wandered down to Main Street and started praying for direction. The boys started following the sound of a train which soon led us into an alleyway filled with sketchy looking teens. The boys saw this as an opportunity to minister while we girls saw it as an opportunity to be murdered. Somehow the boys took the lead and we were forced to make our way over to the little criminals, only to find that they were actually really friendly church kids who were hanging outside a Christian skating rink. We spent the rest of the night at that skating rink, getting free food, drinks, and skates. The kids there were awesome and gave us dancing lessons, bracelets, and bandanas. The lady who owned the rink also ended up getting us a motel room to stay in that night.
The next day we went to a church one of the kids had told the boys about. They had a really good church service and the people there blessed us with about $70 for food. We happily used our money to go to a diner after church and wouldn’t you know it, the waitress ended up tipping us 9 more dollars. We wandered around the town after lunch, waving at the kids we had seen the night before. We were given even more money throughout the day from people who had heard of us from others. Not sure of what to do next we started going to houses to see if we could help people with anything they needed done or pray with them. At one house we noticed a very cute little kitty that we stopped to pat. After going to a couple more houses and praying for people we crossed a busy road and turned back to notice the kitty had been following us and was about to follow us over that road. “NOOO KITTYYY!” I yelled, but it was too late. The kitty was crossing the street and a suburban was quickly approaching! He has about to the middle but then he was scared, so he started turning back! Then it happened, the car struck the kitty on his back legs and sailed past! The kitty howled and I screamed, the boys tried to tell me not to look but I ran up to the mangled little kitty, put my hands on him and yelled, “IN THE NAME OF JESUS THIS KITTY IS HEALED!!” I grabbed the kitty, ran him back to his home and placed him back on the ground. Wouldn’t you know it, that kitty trotted away as happy as a little bee. THE KITTY WAS HEALED!!!
After celebrating the restored kitty we continued on. We prayed for more people, were able to give a lady who had just had her wallet stolen some of the money we had been given, and then started back to where we had been dropped off the previous day to get some supper and wait for our ride back to Tulsa. As we were sitting in the restaurant, I had a feeling we had more left to do in this little town. I continued to get more and more restless as we waited. Finally we decided to just start walking our way out of town and wave at all the cars that went by as a final stretch of our little adventure. We hadn't walked two blocks before a car pulled over. A girl in the car asked us if we were Faith Walkers. We said we were. She told us how her family had helped some Faith Walkers a couple of years ago get back to Tulsa. We were soon amazed to find out that we were carrying the same cross as the team they had helped out and even found where she had signed her name on it! She told us that we needed to meet this woman she knew who was very strong in her faith. Our ride called about that same time and told us we had an extra hour to wait because a bridge was out, so we agreed to go and meet this lady.
We were soon sitting in the house of this lady drinking sweet iced-tea hearing about how she was healed from fibromyalgia through faith and how God was now leading her to make a change in this town. She explained how a lot of the local government was very corrupt and that she was making a stand against it. She broke down in tears as she talked about feeling all alone in this calling God had put on her and how encouraged she felt by us ministering in her town and coming to talk and pray with her. We walked away from her house with a revelation that we had just seen the reason why God had called us into this little town.
Thanks so much for all your prayers and support, I really need it and appreciate it!! Thanks for bearing with me for such a long letter; I will make sure my future ones are much shorter.
Love you all!
Tina
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