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What Are You Cultivating?

Posted Tuesday 18 February 2020

Whenever we get together as a team at Heaven in Healthcare, we’re always overwhelmed by God’s goodness. Since we last met together at our September conference, we’ve heard story after story of people who are seeing God do incredible things in the area of healthcare – from hairdressers bringing the miraculous to elderly care homes to new healthcare initiatives being birthed on the other side of the world.

As we continue to grow the Heaven in Healthcare digital platform, we’re adding more and more of these to our Stories page – and I’d encourage you to check them out and also upload your own. We’d love to hear what’s happening in your world!

At a recent staff meeting, two of our volunteer hospital chaplains shared similar accounts of how they’ve seen more and more people in hospitals relieved of symptoms associated with dementia, purely as a result of spending time with them whilst being aware of God’s presence.

It reminded me of a recent conversation I had with God. I was in my car, on my way to pray for someone who was very sick.

Nothing unusual about that. But this time, my mind was clouded with something.

I’d just picked my car up from the garage, where the brake discs and pads had all been urgently replaced, costing me a considerable amount of money. The problem was, the dealer I’d recently bought the car from was refusing to take responsibility for the fact that they’d just sold me a dangerously unsafe car.

Suddenly, I felt the Holy Spirit ask me, “Dave, what are you cultivating right now?”

You see, I’d been stewing on that problem. And I realised in that moment that I’d been making it my reality. It had become my world.

This is easy to do, and quite possibly normal for many of us, but it’s not God’s best for us.

It would have been perfectly healthy for me in that moment to acknowledge that the car situation was unjust. It would have been perfectly healthy for me to bring that to God. But for me to stay in that place of dwelling on it was wrong, and it wasn’t going to help the situation or anyone else for that matter.

As a result of doing this, I was no longer cultivating an atmosphere of heaven, faith, peace and joy. I was temporarily more aware of the problem facing me than I was God’s presence.

And that was not going to help the person I was about to pray for.

We should never pretend problems aren’t real and hope that they’ll just go away. That’s not faith. It’s actually denial rooted in fear.

But the solutions to our problems aren’t found by looking harder and harder at the problems themselves.

The solutions are found in His presence.

That’s where we’re called to live.

The world of healthcare is one constantly filled with great problems and challenges. And those challenges are very real. But I’d encourage you to take any micro-moment you have in the craziness of your day to just pause for a second. Let Him remind you of His love and marinade you in His goodness.

What we cultivate, pro-creates. The internal reality that you carry around with you will be the one thing you get to share and ‘give away’ to the world around you.

I repented of my thinking, and spent the rest of my car journey receiving my Father’s love and enjoying His presence. As a result, when I prayed for that person, God revealed through a word of knowledge the exact location of the problem in their body. Faith was stirred, power was released and they were greatly encouraged.

Let’s be cultivators of His presence – of heaven’s peace, love and power – as we go about our daily lives this week!