When I woke up Friday morning, I felt really motivated to learn some Portuguese so that I would not be quite so helpless if I did not have an interpreter. I hooked up with one team member on the bus who now lives in Fremont (about a 1/2 hour from my house), but who was born and raised in Brazil and speaks Portuguese as her first language. She helped me with pronunciation on several key phrases (about 20 of them). I wrote them out phonetically on the bus and worked on memorizing them during the Pastor's training conference while Tom Hauser taught on deliverance. I learned phrases like "where does it hurt?" "Pain, leave now." "Is it all better?" "More Pain?" "Less pain?" "more anointing for healing.." "come Holy Spirit." "Fill him/her Lord." "Bless him/her Lord." I sort of ease-dropped on Tom's teaching as I studied these phrases .. it was really good teaching, so from time to time I stopped to listen to him. But for the most part my mission that morning was to memorize these simply phrases.

At the end of the service, Tom asked for a show of hands of those Brazilian pastors who would be willing to minister in the deliverance tent, having now received two hours of training? As it turns out, about 1/3 of the pastors were willing. Tom called them up front for an impartation for authority in deliverance, and asked the team to go lay hands on them. As I did so, there was a fair amount of power. Then I heard a Portuguese phrase running through my mind that I had not learned, but that was constructed from other words and phrases I'd studied.. "Come, Lord Jesus, fill him with power and authority." My pronunciation was pathetic, but the Holy Spirit was helping me and the man understood what I prayed. Suddenly it was like God had electrocuted him. The visible manifestations of God's power on him went up dramatically.

As I moved around and prayed, the Lord helped me put my limited vocabulary together into meaningful sentences and prayers. (You would have to know me and how bad I am at languages to know what a big miracle this was for me to pray this way!) God wanted to fill and empower these people so much that He even helped me do will in one of my weakest areas.. foreign languages. In fact, from that point forward, I began picking up Portuguese. I started understanding what some of the main thrusts of the songs were, etc. I never got good enough to speak the language, but I did get much better at it. At times I was able to understand that my interpreters had mis-interpreted something and I was able to correct them. It was like I suddenly improved 200% in my language skills. That may not sound like much to you, but it was a really big thing for me because I knew I was moving outside of my natural ability, and God was helping me to do it!

The big Friday night meeting did not go as expected. There were a lot of snags, such as they had forgotten to advertise the pre-meeting at the healing tent where Rodney was preaching and the team was praying for healing before the service started. We did not have anyone to pray for, so Randy prayed for impartation for the team members instead. (That was literally a case of "their loss is our gain." I was deeply touched when Randy prayed for us and was on the grass for quite a while. I could feel God's power oozing through me. Also, that burning esophagus problem went away. It had been so bad that I was unable to eat when then took the team to a really fancy restaurant that served all sorts of meats. I had been feeling a bit "cheated".. thoughts ran through my mind like "It's not fair. I want to eat/enjoy this meal too." The other thought that ran through my mind was, "God why on earth would you heal a leg problem that wasn't bothering me and leave me with this esophagus problem that makes it impossible to eat?!" But as I lay on the grass and God's power washed over me, the burning went away and that was pretty much the end of it. (The next day they took the team back to the same place and I got to enjoy the meal there after all.)

The service itself was incredible. About 16,000 to 18,000 people were there. We expected more in the neighborhood of 25,000 (with 30,000 in attendance by the last night as words of the healings get out). But 16,000 to 18,000 is a LOT of people. It is hard to do a precise count when you are dealing in that quantity of numbers, but we think that (by a conservative estimate) 4,000 were healed in the meeting before the teams started praying for people.

I expected an "open heaven" because there were 8,000 intercessors there surrounding the outdoor auditorium and praying. They had been fasting and praying for 40 days for this event. However, there was a lot of confusion (logistics are tricky when dealing with that many people) and very few ended up in the healing tent after service.

And it was "slow going" for those who we did pray for. The second I arrived, an interpreter grabbed me and dragged me to a little girl in a wheel chair who had severe epilepsy, asthma, brain damage and blindness. Whew! That was a toughie to start with. It was beyond my level of faith. I had enough faith to offer a prayer, but I did not expect God to heal her. I prayed for about 20 minutes and nothing happened. After that, I got some more routine stuff, but there did not seem to be much power to minister. It was straight 5-step model prayer. There was not any electricity.

I only had one verifiable healing all evening. This was a man who had a bad headache and big lump on head. The lump and pain disappeared. Then he asked for prayer about having invited a demon to empower him to make him better at sports.. I tried to send him to the deliverance tent, but he would not go. So I finally prayed a blessing over him, sort of trying to get rid of him. He knew he had to come back the next day and go to the deliverance tent. I was just trying to make him feel loved and ministered to between now and then by praying a blessing. I also led him to pray a prayer of recommitment to the Lordship of Jesus in his life.

About 1/2 way through, a really strong demon manifested. The guy literally grew 5 inches taller and began snarling and shouting and his voice changed. He clenched his fists and began to make motions that he was going to strike me. A holy boldness came over me and I pressed closer, pointing my finger at his face and practically touching his nose. A huge crowd quickly gathered around me to watch. It took a few minutes to gain authority and close this thing down. It was a very dramatic manifestation. The first thing I did was to forbid violence against me, the demonized man or any observer. The demon tried several times to hit me, but it was like he struck an invisible force field about 6 inches from my face, and he could not touch me. I took authority in English and the demon continued resisting in Portuguese for about three minutes. It snarled and shouted in a loud voice and the man's face was contorting in ways that did not look humanly possible. Then I said, "I have authority over you because of Jesus, and you have to submit." The demon began whimpering like a scared dog and then stopped manifesting. My instructions were to shut down demons and send them to the deliverance tent, I was not allowed to do deliverance in the healing tent. So that is what I did. I spend a little time doing post prayer counseling and follow up and got him to commit to come back the next day to the deliverance tent and get rid of this thing once and for all.

However, many of the people who had gathered to "watch the show" were very impressed with the way the demon had to submit to the Lord's authority. They were mostly Christians who did not yet understand their authority in Christ, and they wanted the type of authority they'd just seem me minister in. There was not much requests for healing in the tent that night, so I spent the rest of the ministry time praying for anointing and impartation for those people. That part was a lot of fun and God seemed to show up and touch them.