"God is alive and God is Real!"

Every day in my class we start with prayer. We share prayer requests and pray together in various ways, and on this day nothing was really unusual. I asked for them to raise their hand if they had a prayer request and each of them shared their various problems one by one. "I have a headache." (Everyone has had a headache for at least a few weeks now :-)!) "My mom is sick...My grandma is sick...I have a mosquito bite (another common one)..etc etc etc." One little boy raised his hand and shared with the class that he had a stomach ache. Again, this is a fairly normal prayer request for a bunch of 5 and six year olds living in Africa! Well, as soon as the prayer was over, this little boy shouts out--"I have something very exciting to share! I have been healed! My stomach feels better! God has healed my stomach."

This in and of itself was a pretty amazing moment, but later at lunch the story continued. I was on lunch duty so I was sitting under the one tree where I could see the majority of the playground. This little boy comes over and sits near me and quietly says, "My stomach is starting to hurt again..." We talked for a few minutes about what we could do about that...he quickly suggested that he could of course pray and that he was sure God would heal him again.

(You should know that every day in class we also read a Bible story and then I just let them ask questions. A few weeks ago we had been specifically talking about the fact that God was alive.)

So after a few more minutes of quietly playing by me, he just looks up at me and declares, "But Miss Holladay, I just realized, God is real and God is alive! The class was right--God is real and God is alive!"

I was fairly stunned, but I just looked at him and asked him when he realized that. He quickly replied, "I realized it today. I realized it when God healed me today!"

It was a fairly incredible moment of remembering what child like faith really does look like.

Oh, and if you happen to be reading this when it is still Thanksgiving--Happy Thanksgiving. I am thanking God right now for the faith of this little boy and the way it pointed me to God!!