It happened during a gathering in our home. We’d had dinner
some time ago, finished the dishes together, and now we were gathered in the
living room, with mugs of hot tea, and the warm glow of good friendship.
It seemed good to us and to the Holy Spirit to pray for
individuals, for healing. We were all good friends, so there was much laughing
and interaction while we prayed. That’s just who we were, and we didn’t feel
the need to be different when we were with God.
We’d just finished praying for one person, and they got up from
the “hot seat” (really a “hot hassock”: a place for them to sit in the middle
of the group, so we could all see and all lay hands on if called for).
One of the women kind of hobbled to the center of the room
and sat gently down on the hassock as soon as it was vacant. She announced that
she’d hurt her back lifting something incorrectly, and needed it healed,
please. We turned our attention to her, and asked God for his prayers for her;
if Jesus only said what he heard Father saying, we figured that was a good
model for us, so we waited for those prayers.
And we waited.
The silence went on for a while, and it became kind of
awkward. The fact that it was silence was unusual: there wasn’t laughing or
joking going on; people were listening for God’s prayers for our sister’s back.
And we waited. I asked a couple of the more prophetic people
if they had anything, but they didn’t. This was unusual. So we waited.
Then, quietly, a teenager in the back of the room giggled.
Yeah, I thought, this is rather odd: all these adult believers can’t even pray
for one woman’s back. I can see why she’d laugh.
And her laughter continued. She tried, for a moment, to
stifle it, but that never works, and it didn’t work this time. OK, so she’s
laughing. What is God saying, for how to pray for this back?
But the laughing teenager was herself funny, and a couple
more people glanced at her and chuckled. And they fought it, and they, too,
were unsuccessful. And the laughter spread. And nobody knew why.
And soon, nobody was even trying to pray for the woman’s
strained back; we were just laughing, loudly, uproariously. We didn’t know why
we were laughing, but it was clearly not something we had the capacity to stop!
And after four or five minutes of unrestrained hilarity, the
laughter slowly faded back out, ending as it began, with the happy teenager in
the corner. Maybe five or ten minutes had passed.
And the woman who had sat down with the hurt back now stood
up and stretched. “Aaaah.” she announced. “That’s much better. No more pain.
Thanks guys.” And she walked, confidently, completely upright, out to the
kitchen for a fresh cup of tea.
We looked at each other, shrugged our shoulders, chuckled
again, and decided that we like hanging out with a sneaky God.