My professor wasn’t much of one to let his students get away with simply inheriting knowledge—he loved to set us up to practice what we were learning. So when a Catholic school in town invited him to bring a team to pray for healing for the attendees of a special event, he threw me right into the fire.
I didn’t know much about how prophetic words worked at the time. In fact, I got laughed at once when I tried to give one. In attempts to learn, we were set up in a scenario similar to speed dating. There was a line of the people doing the praying and a line of the people who were being prayed for. You had about 30 seconds to pray for the person in front of you before they moved on to the next person.
“Just say whatever comes to your mind and when we’re all done we’ll see if any of your words connected with the person you prayed for,” my professor said.
And so that’s what I did. I prayed the first thing that came to my head for the girl standing in front of me. “Uh… God. If this person was ever thinking of pursuing something related to hair…”
My prayer was cut short by her laughter. Apparently my word wasn’t really connecting.
But despite that, now I was at a Catholic school being told to pray for healing for people and to follow any prophetic inclination the Spirit gave me. Apparently this was how I was supposed to learn. Practice makes perfect I guess.
Nothing super crazy happened that night, but my eyes were opened to see some of the wonders I had been hearing about—and in a Catholic school no less! A priest from New Zealand took the stage, gave a short message, and then proceeded to give around 30 prophetic words to the gathering that showed up. It seemed he had been writing these words down as they came to him in the days or weeks leading up to the event. Straight down the list he went, explaining all the different conditions he felt people needed prayer for.
I didn’t feel like I got any radical prophetic words that night, but I did try to listen for God and pray with any inclinations I felt. Whether those inclinations were the Holy Spirit or not, I don’t know. But I do recall tears in the eyes of those I prayed for.
Want to continue the conversation? Take the long journey with my book/audiobook, The Rush and the Rest, or take a shorter path with my condensed version, Fantasy IRL.
Jamin Bradley 