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33K monthly gatherings are a highlight for me. There is a network of youth pastors across the city who gather once a month to celebrate the work happening in our churches serving the 33,000 young people of Christchurch. Each month I’m encouraged by the things I hear other youth pastors sharing about how God is moving in their youth groups and getting to pray alongside them. I showed up at my first gathering just three weeks after landing in New Zealand, and I’ve grown familiar with several of the youth pastors who show up consistently and watched the group make space for some new youth pastors who are filling roles in churches investing in our future.

This week when I rocked up and greeted Hannah who helps host them, I commented how these are a monthly highlight for me while Mike made me a flat white and I chatted with a couple other youth pastors. I shared I was looking into some funding to run a youth group event at the end of the term down the street at the local pool. Then we realised the three of us all had students who attended the same school, and I suggested we try to make a joint event. I’m not sure what the final details will be, but how cool that I could dream like this on the spot because of such a good community gathering between denominations.

As we grouped up to pray at the end of the gathering, I was sitting next to a CDN youth worker who I see regularly pass through my office. He’d been sharing about his growing conviction that God wants us to pray big prayers and ask for bold miracles as he moves. He’d also shared the tension of discerning when God is using a disability for his glory as well. Ben’s example was a congregation of blind believers he’s made plans to visit in Cambodia. He was celebrating what an important gift it was for those people to have a ministry that makes community and church accessible to them where they are at – but what if God wanted to miraculously give sight to the whole congregation? I loved listening to his sensitivity and care for how ableist assumptions often disregard the value and image of God present in those with disabilities just as they are while also not wanting to preemptively quench they Holy Spirit.

I shared a quite condensed version of my perspective as someone who has been deeply convicted that I need to pray for a miraculous healing and invite people into it while having waited for said miraculous healing for going on ten and a half years. Ben admitted to how he’d waited to hear my story rather than presuming to pray for my miraculous healing, wanting to know what God has made known with how I move through the world.

Growing up, my church tradition didn’t see a lot of miracles, but my parents and pastors and later Bible college professors all taught me to expect miracles I can’t explain. I’ve heard too many stories of God intervening to disbelieve in miracles. When I ask for you to join me in praying for this miracle, it’s with the weight of a decade of tugging deep in my heart that this is what God wants layered with years of people sharing dreams, visions, and “Holy Spirit nudges” (in some traditions called prophetic gifting) indicating a full and complete healing is not only in God’s will but is inevitable.

Now bear with me as I nerd out on the grammatical tension of the convictions of three biblical heroes from the book of Daniel and dovetail with that theological claim. These three guys upset the king by worshipping the true God, and their punishment is to be thrown in a fiery furnace. In the NIV and the ESV, you’ll find a note that there is another translation option that resolves the grammatical tension, but the teams of scholars studying this passage chose to headline this significant idea. In the NIV, Daniel 3:16-18 reads, “Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego replied to him, ‘King Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to defend ourselves before you in this matter. If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to deliver us from it, and he will deliver us from Your Majesty’s hand. But even if he does not, we want you to know, Your Majesty, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up'” (emphasis mine). Walk through each bolded phrase: God can; God will; if God doesn’t. That contingency hangs after the conviction of fulfilment. That’s where I live right now. God can; God will; if God doesn’t, my faith is unchanged.

You have an invitation hanging here to be a part of the “God can; God will” conviction and ask God to heal me while also staying true to the “even if he doesn’t, we still know he can.” I know this makes a lot of people uncomfortable, and to be honest, it’s not the most comfortable for me. But we all know that God shows up in the uncomfortable to stretch us and grow us. I’m ready to grow, and I’m asking you, are you ready too?