Searching for miracles and healings - if there is a God and if He is willing to interact with humans there should be some proof of such interaction. Taking into account that one of the design premises of our world is not to force humans to believe but to find those who are willing to, such events will need to be searched for. See more at the link below.
Searching for miracles and healings
Below follows examples of answered prayers and events that were extraordinary from my own life and others. These also count as supernatural events. I mention these here because there are people that maintain that no prayer ever gets answered.
That is not true.
(Note that God has told us that there are requirements to be met for prayer to be answered like explicitly, knowingly putting your faith in Jesus with a view of following Jesus because you believe in Him - giving your life to Him. I have met people who pray very hard but that did not know about this and were puzzled or upset that their prayers were not answered.)
Case 1: How I came to realize that God exists and that He is good
This is not a healing but something supernatural that happened to me.
The first time I can remember where I consciously decided I had to follow Jesus was on a youth camp in 1987. I was about 13 years old at that stage.
The person talking / preaching to us was the youth leader at our Dutch Reformed church on Stellenbosch in South Africa.
He was preaching from Matthew 28:
16 Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. 17 When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. 18 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
He pointed out that Jesus commanded us to go and make disciples. It was not an optional thing but a command. While he was saying this I realized I was not following Jesus, I was not obeying Him, nor did anybody I knew. I was cut to the heart and I realised that I only lived for myself. The impression was so deep that I immediately changed the direction of my life to try to obey Jesus.
As I understand it now I crossed the line of just mentally acknowledging Jesus to really believing in Him because for the first time I put weight on my faith by consciously starting to try to follow Jesus. My life changed greatly after that. As far as I can tell I became born again in my heart. Before I was only living for myself and although outwardly I didn't do much wrong inwardly there was a big problem. After this I saw the whole world and everything else in a different light. My brother and I used to fight a lot before this event. After this that changed completely. We only quarreled a few times after that. Maybe 2 or 3 times up till today.
Although the inward change was big I didn't experience God directly in any way. I just believed in Jesus and God as that was the default assumption. I didn't question God’s existence.
Some time went by and my focus shifted to normal things most of the time. We moved from Stellenbosch to Meyerspark a suburb of Pretoria in 1988 and therefore to a new school and church. New friends had to be made and there was a lot of change to adapt to.
Then one day in 1990 I was walking home and I took a shortcut through our church grounds passing the church hall. I think it was a Sunday after Sunday school. As I was passing I heard Hennie Conradie - an acquaintance - talking to some people asking them who was going to join them to pray to receive the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. I think he mentioned that they would do it that coming Thursday at Skuilkrans AFM in Silverton. The AFM is a Pentecostal church originally started by John G. Lake when he was a missionary in South Africa around 1908.
When I heard the term Baptism in the Holy Spirit it struck me that I had never even heard of such a thing in my entire life. I had never heard such a term. I immediately became angry at my church because I wondered how it could be that you can go to Sunday school for 16 years of your life - do well in all the tests - and then there could still be something about Christianity that you didn't know. I had not heard that term mentioned even once - not ever.
I walked home thinking about this still feeling very upset.
When I got to my room I switched on an old radio I had of my grandfather who had passed away. I had been busy cleaning it. It was set to Radio Pulpit - it was still transmitting on 2000 FM in those days. I caught the last bit of a program. It was a lady talking about what she called “The knowledge of God”. She linked it to a Jewish word “yada”.
Me still being very upset and angry at my church prayed and said “God please give me this yada thing this woman is talking about.” That was my total prayer. I was kneeling against my bed as that was my favourite position for reading stuff or thinking. I took the Bible and opened it randomly in the Old Testament - it opened by Moses and the Israelites.
As soon as I started reading I felt an amazing feeling of love. It was very strong. Love towards myself but not just myself also towards Moses and the Israelites I was busy reading about and in fact to all people. It was really amazing. And besides feeling intense love I could also understand God’s heart and His thinking and reasoning. It was amazing because all of a sudden I could see God’s intense desire to have a relationship with people. Also that He had wanted a personal relationship with the people of Israel - they never understood that part though and just stuck to the rules and ultimately a religion.
I saw that God eagerly wanted all people to be saved but that He had to stick to the rules He had created. He could not save a person unless they asked Him to. He could not override a person's free choice in this regard. His own rules didn't allow it. God really really didn't want anybody to be lost. He could however only save people by a special loophole (Jesus) He created and only if they asked Him to. If anybody even remotely asked Him to save them He would immediately do it.
I also saw that God really looked for excuses to have mercy on people and how if we prayed for somebody and asked God to have mercy on the person how that then enabled Him to ignore and set aside the accusations of the devil who was always trying to destroy people by first trying to get them to do evil things that will get them into trouble and then demanding from God to apply the rules on any wrong thing they may have done. If nobody interceded for somebody and the person him or herself did not ask for help or mercy a point could be reached where the constant demand for justice could no longer be ignored. To God this would then be a very regrettable situation.
I saw that God really loved people no matter who they were or how they appeared. This impacted me profoundly because it showed me I can accept all people and ignore their outward appearance. This really impressed me a lot because I could see God really loved and were concerned about people much more than they expected. I tried to convey that to people at the time but I found it impossible to get people to understand it. It also changed me in the sense that I stopped blaming people for their bad behaviour. I saw that there were many external and internal factors contributing to who a person became.
I also became aware of how the devil tries to destroy people by hurting them and by piling up stuff on a vulnerable person, through friends, through values of “society”, through unkind or seemingly harmless jokes, through judgementality at just the right time in order to try to drive people to collapse and even suicide if possible.
Most of all I saw that God was really really good. A really amazing person with an amazing heart. I didn't need to use formal prayers or anything like that to approach Him. I could just talk to Him like a normal person. Some of the things I realised about God’s heart was really intimate and I sometimes felt amazed that God would share such things, things that you would feel God would not want to reveal.
In that time I started to read my Bible a lot - for hours and hours. My parents were even worried.
In church where I always used to struggle to stay awake, now I was riveted. Wide awake. Absorbing every word the preacher said. This continued for years afterwards. I was also very aware of preachers that were full of the Holy Spirit. You could see God’s love on their faces.
I remember during that time, one night, walking home after church or a youth meeting saying to myself: “I don't believe the Bible is true. I know it is true.”
Towards the end of the experience after having read a lot of the Bible especially Revelations and the Gospels it became clear to me that many people would lose their faith towards the end or they would be deceived into weird stuff. I remember I started to worry a lot that it could happen to me and that after experiencing God, that was so amazing, that I could actually miss Him at the end of my life. I worried about this intensely and I prayed to God for hours and hours to please never let this happen. This was not part of the experience but it was my reaction to it because it was so real to me. I was young and there weren't a lot of people who I thought could have related so I just kept things to myself.
This feeling of love and God’s presence continued for quite a while. I didn't keep track but it may have gone on for 3 to 6 months. At the end the feeling started to slowly draw away. For a while I could get it back if I prayed for like 40 minutes or so. Later it went away completely and I have never been able to get it back again or anything similar to it. It is now 30 years after the fact.
The changes it created in my heart stretches even till now even though I have forgotten some of the details. This event certainly also helped me to keep my faith and to focus on trying to follow Jesus.
Lastly - one thing that is really interesting to me. When I asked God for knowledge of Him I didn't do it as a planned thing. I had no idea what I was even asking for and the concept itself was new to me. I was just upset. But then looking back at the end result of the whole experience, I received exactly, like in precisely, what I asked for even though I didn't understand what I asked for. It was a completely once off experience and the knowledge that I obtained did not come by studying the Bible or anything else. It came while reading the Bible but not only through reading the Bible and also not through the information I was reading. I read the same passages some years later without a similar effect at all.
Anyhow that is how I came to realize that God really exists and that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob the God of Israel and the Bible is the one who created everything.
Case 2: The family and my stove.
At one time around 2014 I took a family into my flat in Sunnyside where I used to stay. They were on the streets and had nowhere to go.
On one particular Sunday I started to realise that they were using my stove a lot, boiling food for hours on end. I came to the realisation that this was going to be very expensive. I can’t remember if I tried to get them to use the stove more sparingly. But at some point I realised that this would be futile - I would never be able to get them to use the stove less.
This was a big issue to me on that particular day. My heart was very upset. I cried out to God in anguish and asked Him to do something to make them stop using the stove.
Later that same afternoon while they were using the stove there was this electric arc with a loud bang. They had such a fright that they never used my stove again for years afterwards until I got a new stove in 2020. After this event they used a single electric frying pan.
Case 3: 2018 Health scare and my visit to hospital
In September 2018 I was invited to go and visit family with my cousin. On the way it was very hot and I started to feel quite bad. Even before that I was not great. I had had flu or bronchitis and I had been very ill for about two weeks. My mental state was not good. At times especially in the heat I would start to feel bad. I went to a 24 hour Emergency center where they found that I had high blood pressure.
Eventually I went to see my lung specialist. He had me admitted to hospital to monitor my blood pressure and to have an MRI as there were some other long standing issues I wanted him to check. He had a Neurologist and a Psychiatrist see me too. Mentally I was in a very bad place - I think triggered by the bout of flu I had. Maybe a kind of PTSD.
On the way to the hospital I asked God that I did not want to see any patients. Usually I would witness to the other patients around me. However now I told God I was in too bad a state and I did not want to be seen like that and also especially since I was also going to see a Psychiatrist. I did not feel like I could witness to anyone.
When I got to the hospital they put me into an empty ward I had not been in before. I was the only patient in it. Later the same or the next day they told me more patients were coming and they were going to move me into a private room at no extra cost. Apparently the entire ward opened up suddenly as the doctor assigned to it fell ill and they had to cancel all his pending operations.
During my entire stay of a few days (3 or 4) I did not see a single other patient. They were there in the other shared rooms but our paths never crossed once.
I recovered from all these issues in the end without needing any chronic medication.
Case 4: Mount Sinai and my flight to Cape Town
Some years back, in 2013, I was researching the location of Mount Sinai. After a lot of checking I concluded that it looked like it was Jabal Al Lawz in Saudi Arabia.
I proceeded to create an album of some significant photos I found. It can be found here:
There are numerous videos on this these days. There were not that many at that time.
I was extremely excited.
This was around October 2013.
There are scholars who differ with this conclusion - however I think they are wrong.
In December 2013 I was going to fly back to Cape Town to my parents as I do every year.
While packing I told God that I did not think Jewish people really knew about this. After thinking I told God that I would be in a public space since I would be on a plane. And since I would be in a public place He could just as well put a Jewish person next to me and then I could tell the person about this. However the person would have to sit to the left of me so I could speak to them (I am disabled and I can’t really speak to people to the right of me).
So I packed and left for the airport. I actually forgot about what I asked because of the rush.
While checking in at some point I remembered that I always ask to be seated near the toilets. I asked them and so they changed my seat.
I was loaded onto the plane and put into my seat on the left side of the plane.
Not long after that a young woman came and took the window seat to my left. I was in the aisle seat with a seat empty between us.
When she passed me she looked Jewish to me.
During take off I saw her open a small book with Hebrew characters.
I think I asked her what it was and I think she said it was a prayer book.
So I concluded that she was Jewish and that God had answered my prayer.
So then I realised that since I had asked for it I had now better show her what I found.
I did that and told her about my prayer. I told her that I believed Jesus was the Messiah but that I thought that God for that day just wanted me to tell her that He is real and that He really exists and that she must know that everything about Moses and the Israelites was all true and she must not doubt. I also told her about my experience I had with God.
To me this was an amazing event and I think that it was the only Jewish person I had ever flown next to.
Case 5: The AA Bakkie
Shortly after my experience with God my family, some friends and I went on a trip to the Kruger National Park. This was probably in 1991.
In the park you were not allowed to exit your car except in the camps or at designated areas where you could get out to cook food.
On one of the days that we were in the park we decided to get out and eat at such a designated eating area “Mooiplaas”. It was very close to a camp called “Mopani”.
After eating we loaded everything back into the cars. We were about to leave when it became apparent that some people were having trouble with their car. It was a Mercedes Benz. Somehow the steering lock had engaged and there was no way that the people could get it to disengage.
Due to my recent experience I had had with God and His love I had incredible emotional compassion on people. For some reason I was deeply worried about these people. I started praying to God for Him to help them. I prayed with extreme compassion crying out to God.
My parents and their friends decided that our family would drive to the nearby Mopani camp and then proceed to call the Automobile Association (AA) to come and help. There were no cell phones yet.
We proceeded to leave and joined the short stretch of road between the eating site and the Mopani camp. As we started on the road a bakkie was coming up on us very fast. Much faster than you were allowed to drive. As I saw the car I already had a premonition that this was an AA bakkie. Sure enough as it passed us we saw that indeed it was.
My father proceeded to chase him down and he pulled over. We explained the problem to him. He told us that we were extremely lucky. He was the only AA vehicle in the entire park and he was on the way to the far north - to Punda Maria. He proceeded to turn around to help the people.
That was quite an amazing experience. The length of the road between Mooiplaas and Mopani is extremely short. Ten seconds later and we would have missed the vehicle. Help would only have come the next day. On the map below I highlighted the distance in red.
Case 6: Praying for having something to say during evangelism
In 1999 / 2000 I joined a Pentecostal / Evangelical church. I had just finished my University studies. I knew in my heart that Jesus likes it when a person talks to other people about Him with the view of helping people to attain salvation. I had made up my mind that I would get involved in this, not to earn salvation but to show Jesus in a practical way that I had decided to love Him. I wanted to show Him I loved Him by my actions and not just my words. By doing things I knew He liked and wanted.
To that end I joined the church every Friday night and Saturday morning in talking to people on the streets and malls about Jesus.
We always went out two by two.
There was one problem though - I always felt empty - I had nothing to say. After the sessions I had a lot of observations to share about what we should have done or said - but during it I felt empty with nothing to say.
During that time I decided to make a list of things to pray for. I prayed through the list daily. I decided to add to my list a request that God would make me like the other people in the church and that He would give me something to say.
I prayed through that point on my list for 10 (or 14 - it is a long time ago) consecutive days. I remember that on the 10th day when I got to the point again - I realized that my request was answered. It was such a strong, spontaneous conviction that I removed the point from my list.
Ever since then up till today I have always had something in my heart to say during talking to people about Jesus. What God did and how He did it I don’t know - I just know He did something and it lasted for 20 years thus far.
Case 7: Sarah and a place to stay
Many years back, probably in the early 2000s I knew a woman - Sarah. She and her husband got kicked out of the place they were staying in - the husband lost his job and they lost their child to the state. They were alcoholics. She came to me with the problem of not having a place to stay. I prayed with her in my flat for God to help us in this regard. We then proceeded to leave in order to look for a place for her to stay.
I did not have the faintest idea how to proceed.
As we got outside I saw an old black man in a blue overall walking up the street in our direction. I told myself - this is just how God will be - I will ask this old man and he will show us where to go. I proceeded to ask him. He told us where to go and ask.
We went and knocked. A very scary looking middle aged white man opened who had a huge fresh stab wound in his head. He told us straight that there was no place there for anybody.
However just shortly after that Sarah informed me that she and her husband were staying there and that the rent was very low. I had to pay the rent but the low price made it affordable to me. They stayed there for several years.
Case 8: An old friendship rekindled
I had been friends with a specific person on and off since around 2005. Around 2012 we lost contact. The person also moved away.
Around 2015, my family and I were at the sea for the December holidays. One night I asked God that I would like to be friends with this person again. That very night the person called me out of the blue after many years. So from there the friendship developed again.
Case 9: My question on mental health healings
Around 2018 I remember praying to God saying that although there seemed to be quite a lot of testimonies on physical healing there did not seem to be that many related to mental health. I must admit though that I had not really researched it that well. But this was how I had put it to God at the time.
That same night that I had discussed it with God, during the midweek church service sermon, our pastor gave a testimony about his mother that I had never heard of before. He had never mentioned it in the previous 20 years. I had not discussed my prayer to God with anyone.
Our pastor related the following:
His father had been an alcoholic and he and his family had eventually persuaded his mother to divorce his father.
After the divorce the mental state of his mother deteriorated. She even tried to commit suicide by jumping into a river.
Eventually things got so bad that she ended up in a special mental ward or hospital. They put her on medication and she was unable to speak.
Our pastor related how a visiting preacher from the USA came to preach for him in Holland.
He told this man about his mother. This man insisted doggedly to see her in order to pray for her to be healed. Eventually they went. When there the man fell to the floor and commenced to pray for her earnestly. I think the pastor said she woke up immediately. Her condition improved rapidly after this and she was discharged very soon after.
Case 10: Brent going to his sister
Around 2001 / 2002 we were handing out flyers (pamphlets) in Hatfield, Pretoria - inviting people to a kind of a church outreach coffee bar. I saw a man coming past. He was limping. I proceeded to give him a flyer and that was that.
On the night of the coffee bar I saw this man coming in. I made a point of talking to him. His name was Brent. He told me he was going to stay by one of the people (Pieter) in the church for the weekend. I told him to rather stay over at my place for the weekend.
This weekend turned into a stay of about 10 years.
He later told me how he had lived a very rough life culminating in him stealing a car from the mafia in Cape Town and having to flee to Pretoria. He was about 40 at this time. He also told me how he had listened to street preaching by our church members across from where he stayed and how he had gotten saved. Either while Allistair was preaching or Allistair prayed with him to receive Jesus while somebody else was preaching. He told me his heart and personality changed completely.
At the end of the 10 year stay - in 2010 - I took in a family into my flat as well. We were now super overcrowded. Six in a flat meant for 1 person. One day when I got home Brent was gone. He had left for his sister. I was quite shocked. Soon after this - about 2 weeks - he passed away.
Just before his passing we had a last phone call.
During this call he explained to me that the last morning at my flat God told him to go to his sister. He proceeded to call his sister and spoke to her husband asking if he could come and pick him up. It was quite a distance and the husband told him that there was no way he was going to come and pick him up. He had just gone on leave. Brent told him - well God had told him to come and so they hung up with Brent having no way to get to his sister. However after about 5 minutes his sister’s husband called back and told him to get his things ready. The company he works for just called. A machine had broken down in Pretoria and he was the only person in the company who could fix it. So they called him in from leave and he would pick up Brent in passing.
God obviously knew Brent was going to pass away. I had no idea. The last few weeks with his sister was very good for him spiritually. I think God gave him that time to clean up and make everything right before taking him.
Case 11: That really really helped me
For years, really up to COVID 19 (2020), we used to speak to people about Jesus on the streets. Stopping them and then asking them what they thought about God, Jesus and life after death.Such conversations were often quite interesting especially if you asked God to lead you to speak to the right people and you then made a point of believing that God would arrange this.
I remember one such occasion where it was not going great with me and I did not really feel like speaking to anyone. I was very low. In desperation I asked God that I wanted to speak to somebody who it would “really, really help”. I stressed the “really”. I had never asked for this in this exact way before nor after that day. I think I was trying to tell God that since I was not doing great I wanted a meaningful conversation, not just a wasted one that meant nothing to the person I was talking to.
I stopped a person randomly and the conversation was great, I can’t actually recall precisely what we talked about but as the person was turning away he said, “thanks, that really really helped me”. He stressed the “really”. I was quite shocked at this because it was the exact words and tone I had directed towards God directed back at me. In 18 years of speaking to people I had never phrased a request in that way towards God, nor had anyone walked away saying exactly that back at me.
I knew for sure that God had heard me and that He had answered my prayer and that this person had somehow been helped.
Case 12: My brother and the back door
Around 1993 / 1994 my brother got home to my parent’s house. I think it was after school. He found the house locked with nobody there. He was effectively locked out.
He was quite desperate and at some point asked God to let things work out in such a way that they would have forgotten to lock the house’s back door.
For some reason though he did not go and check the back door. I guess it was an extremely unlikely scenario that my parents would have left the door unlocked. Instead he tried to climb to an open window on the second floor. In the process he slipped and fell.
In the end my parents got back and they found that the back door had in fact not been locked as my brother had prayed.
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