I have been reading Red Moon Rising and it is amazing book to read. If you don't have this in your libary please go to store and get yourself a copy of this book.
Each night, I come upon an interesting passage but when I was reading this one passage one night about Mikes' story. Mike's life story will amaze you on how thr Lord raised him up from the streets. Here is a section if you don't have the book. Please read on.....
"All things are impossible with the Lord."
Isleen
Red Moon Rising by Pete Greig & Dave Roberts
Kenya P. 40-42
Mike’s instinctive approach to church planting had been simple. He gathered a dozen friends in a room, and they prayed nonstop for forty days. The two who didn’t have jobs had to cover most of the night shifts by themselves, as well a ferry the others to their prayer slots in a beaten up old car. But they did it. They just assumed that this was the way you should plant a church.
Mike Brawan was orphaned at the age of eight when his mother and father were both killed in a car accident. With no one else willing to look after him, he was abandoned and simply left to survive by himself in the streets of Eldoret in Kenya, Africa. For the next six years, Mike slept under the trucks and ate when he could scavenge for rubbish bins. The town’s bus station often provided a place of warmth and shelter and was also a place he learned to steal from the waiting passengers.
At the age of fourteen, Mike situation grew even worse: A friend who had lived on the streets with him was killed when the truck he was sleeping under moved. Grieving from loss again, Mike got arrested for stealing. By the time Mike was released, he had already tried to kill himself. What hope was there for a street kid like him?
Desperate for hope, Mike attended an evangelistic rally at the city stadium. “It was as if the Lord Jesus was speaking directly to me,” he recalled, and that night the orphaned street-kid quietly committed his life to Christ.
Mike continued to live on the street and was eventually poisoned by some food he had scavenged. Taken into the hospital by some kind Christians, his condition became critical. The street kid was expected to die.
But God had different ideas, and that night, a “glowing doctor” (as Mike would later describe him) appeared at the foot of the dying boy’s bed. In the morning, Mike woke to confound the doctors. He had been completely healed. Upon discharge, he was invited to live with a Christian family who taught him to read and write and encouraged Mike to go back to school. It was the first real care anyone had shown him since the day he had lost hi parents.
Eight years later, I met Mike, now twenty-two. He was studying in England with a view of establishing a ministry for street kids like him back in Kenya. I was stunned by his testimony and amazed to hear that impressed me, and with highsight, I realize that his young African understood far more about “God strategy for taking Jericho” than we did with our cool music and our clever books.
After forty days, they went out and began to preach. On the first day, they began to preach once again. This time a crazy homeless kept heckling them, until eventually he gave his life to the Lord. This was their first convert, and the transformation in him was so marked that many others followed. Mike’s church, planted through prayer, grew quickly and now had several hundred members, including a local politician.
Mike’s story has sown a seed in my mind. Even prior to this trip, we had been convicted about continual prayer by Mike’s example in Kenya, and there had been some discussion about the feasibility of a similar forty-day stand. But now, finding myself in Hernnhut, the idea was making more sense than ever. Suddenly. Continual prayer didn’t seem so outrageous or ridiculous. In fact, it was starting to seem like a perfectly natural thing for a church to do.
Just thirty-seven days later a candle would be lit that would unwittingly spark a new Moravian movement of prayer and mission. But first we had to drive south to Prague, on the way. God would hijack us once again…….
