Do You Believe In Miracles?

Three weeks ago we packed up our Kombi and with our family and four youth from our church drove the bumpy dusty Transamazon Highway to a conference on Healing in the Streets in Altamira.  I had no idea that one of the first miracle healings I would witness would be my own.
 The day before it happened, I admitted to someone that I was a bit of a 'doubting Thomas', that I would have to see or experience something like a limb growing in order to believe it.  The next night at the conference on 'Healing in the Streets', the speaker, who was from Ireland and therefore being translated, asked if anyone in the audience had one leg shorter than the other.  My hand seemingly involuntarily shot up.  Because everyone else didn't understand what he said until it was translated, I was the first one.  He called me up and I was immediately surrounded by 300 people and regretting having put my hand up.  He explained that Christ gave all His disciples the authority to heal the sick.  Just as the Apostles did, they spoke to the problem and to it told go in Jesus name, and that because we are disciples we have the same authority.  At that he gently held my feet in his open hands and told my back to be straight (I was diagnosed with mild scoliosis when I was twelve) and I felt something shift in my back and I think I stopped breathing.  He then told my leg to grow and....well....it did.  There was a loud collective gasp from the crowd as they watched my leg extend to meet the length of the other. I was in shock, my leg just grew, I felt it move through the leg of my shorts as it did.  Turns out that even when I experience something I still have a hard time believing it.
This visual miracle was a great faith booster for our youth (and me!) and they were excited to hit the streets the next day praying for the sick.  We lined chairs up in a busy market street and offered to pray for passersby.  We saw many people healed of pain, bone growths shrink, eye infections disappear and hearts that were broken revealed and healed.  We are bringing this ministry to Maraba, with hopes to visit different parks every month, with worship, dance and theater performances followed by prayer.

In the Bible, when Jesus healed someone he often told them not to tell anyone about it-and of course they did the exact opposite and shouted it from the rooftops.  Many have discussed why He might have told them not to tell anyone.
I posted about my miraculous leg growth experience on Facebook and to my dismay found that it led to a huge debate about the reality of the love of God and miracles between my Christian and non-Christian friends.
In Kevin Dedmon's book 'The Ultimate Treasure Hunt' he says "most people do not come into the Kingdom through a well-developed argument.  They come through an encounter, whether it is a personal testimony of how someone else encountered God in some way, or a supernatural encounter in which God revealed Himself to them in a specific way.  The reality is a man with an experience is never at the mercy of a man with an argument." Although I believed that God could heal anything, clearly before my own encounter, I still had some unbelief.  Because of my own experience, my own encounter, that unbelief is gone.   When God demonstrates His love through physical healing, the veil between heaven and earth is opened and we are able to experience the 'not yet' in the here and now.
We want to introduce the people in our neighbourhood, in our city to a loving and living God, through personal encounter.