They have faith for crazy miracles and they carry radical love

Micah Corbett leads a team of young people who are so full of faith that they look for the most difficult cases during their weekly visits to the Frere Hospital in East London — and they see salvations and healing miracles every week.

Most of them had never shared the Gospel or prayed for the sick when they first joined the team, said the young missionary from New Zealand.

“But now it’s their lifestyle. They are complete fireballs who carry radical love,” she said of the young people from various city churches who join her on a weekly outreach to the hospital.

One of the areas in which they are experiencing breakthrough at the moment is in seeing stroke victims healed of paralysis.

In an interview Micah told me that after she encountered God in a very real way in her small hometown in New Zealand, she completed three years of ministry training at Bethel Church in California.

During her third year at Bethel she visited South Africa on a missionary trip.

“I absolutely loved it and saw the most crazy miracles I had ever seen,” she said.

After completing her training she was ready to go anywhere God sent her as a missionary. She had a dream about East London and a mission at Stoney Drift, a squatter camp next to an old rubbish dump.

She knew God was calling her to East London for a season and He also made it clear to her that she should go immediately, depending on Him to support her.

“I literally had enough money for a plane ticket to East London. It was such a fast transition that I did not even know where I was going to stay when I landed,” she said.

She had an idea to help Josh and Rachael Minter who lead Global Mercy Missions which serves the squatter community at Stoney Drift.

“I wanted to lift up their hands like Moses’s hands were lifted in battle — so that they could be victorious in the city. I came very much with a heartbeat to serve. And I thought: ‘If that looks like cleaning toilets, I’ll clean toilets. If it’s changing diapers, I’ll change diapers.”

But she said God was so good to her that within a short time of her arrival in South Africa a lot of her own dreams started to come alive. One of her passions is evangelism and within her first month she was asked by the mission to pioneer various outreaches.

One day while driving in the city with Josh Minter she heard God tell her that He was giving her a big building that they were passing. She asked Josh what the building was and he said it was Frere Hospital, the local provincial hospital.

In obedience to God’s promise about giving her the building, she, together with a few friends, visited the hospital for the first time just before last Christmas — taking candy to give to patients. A friend Ashleigh, who is a nurse, opened doors for her to start ministering at the hospital.

She kept on visiting the hospital week after week with her friends. Friends invited friends and she met new people on the team every week.

The hospital outreach ministry was completely new to most of the people when they first joined the team and she stayed close to newcomers on their first visit to ease them into the ministry.

Four months ago a friend, Carl, who had never shared the Gospel or prayed with sick people joined the team. There were so many newcomers on the team that day that she had to split the team into groups and Carl was put into a group led by somebody who had only done about three hospital outreaches.

Carl’s group prayed for a woman with severe arthritis that had locked her knees so that she could not bend her legs. As they prayed for the woman she was instantly healed and was able to flex her knee joints. It was the first miracle Carl had ever seen and he has joined the team faithfully on Thursdays ever since.

Recently Carl shared the gospel with a hospital patient who had a collapsed lung. He led her to the Lord, taking her through repentance and forgiveness and in the process her lung was healed.

“Most of the people [outreach team members] have got stories of how ‘I had never done this [shared the Gospel and prayed for the sick] and now it’s my lifestyle’.

“And a lot of them go and do it [healing evangelism] in their own communities, which is so amazing.”

She said there were even some people who they had prayed for while they were patients hospital who had joined the outreach team after they recovered.

She believed the anointing for the breakthrough that they were experiencing with the healing of paralysed people, was a result of contending with God for the healing of a young child at Stoney Drift who became paralysed from the neck down as a result of a stroke at the end of last year.

She and a few colleagues at the mission prayed with the young boy, Enzo, now 2¹⁄2, in his shack when they learned of his plight. Nothing happened and they just held him and cried over him.

Thereafter she prayed regularly for Enzo with her home group. Sometimes a few of them would end up on the floor in tears until the early hours of the morning.

“We would cry out:’Jesus this is not okay. This is our community, this is our boy. Obviously, if You were in the room, Jesus, this child would be healed. And You are inside of us and You have given us all authority, but we also understand the role we have.’

“So there was just this beautiful heartbreaking fight that was going on — and we saying: ‘God give us authority over strokes, over the paralysed.’ ”

She said they did not see an immediate change in Enzo’s condition but from the following week they started seeing healings of hospital patients who were paralysed from strokes.

Then one day Enzo’s mother brought him to the creche at the mission and, to their great joy, one side of his body was healed and there was slight movement in the other side.

“We spend a lot of time sitting with him, singing over him, massaging his muscles. He’s going to get his full freedom. But at the same time we are regularly seeing paralysed people healed at hospital — and it has come from this heartbreak.”

She said that the week before my interview with her they prayed with a man in the hospital with a paralysed arm. They stayed with him for 20 minutes, in contrast with many other prayers which were over in a few seconds.

“With the paralysed, I’ve really learned to fight — just to stay and wait for the miracle. And so we prayed [with the man], and nothing happened. We prayed again and nothing happened. We started massaging his limbs.”

She asked the man to try and move his hand but he could not. Then she asked him to try his shoulder and he was able to move it a little, which he couldn’t before.

“By the end of his time with us he was holding our hands and having little arm wrestles with us. Gripping us. He was a happy man — smiling from ear to ear,” said Micah.

She recalled how a member of her team who was only with them for the third time heard that they were having breakthroughs with praying for paralysed people. So he set out with some of the team members to find a paralysed patient and found a man, called Miracle, who had no movement from the chest down as a result of a car accident.

The team prayed with Miracle for an hour but there was no change in his body.

“I ended up coming in at the end of their hour and the whole team was there, all gathered around this one man and they were all crying out to Jesus and they were all still full of faith, and just loving this guy radically.

“And they all left with smiles, saying we know though we didn’t see anything in the natural, we know this guy is going to get up. It reminded me of fighting for Enzo — the same fire.”

She said she told the team to continue to fight for Miracle in their bedrooms for the whole week, and to pray for him again during their next visit until there was a breakthrough.

She said she had a high regard for the medical profession and believed God used medicine to heal people. But there were times when He chose to heal supernaturally.

The team had a great relationship with the nurses at the hospital and they often directed the team to patients who they said needed a miracle. The nurses also often asked for prayer for themselves and a lot of them had been healed.

The team always preached the Gospel and gave away Bibles during their outreaches. It was like planting seeds. Some people said: “No” but many accepted Jesus. Five people came to salvation during their outreach the previous week.

They had seen people delivered from suicide and starting to attend church.

During their last hospital visit a patient said to one of the young people on the outreach team: “Because of the love you’ve shown me today, I now believe Jesus is real.”