Do you recall me mentioning a tall kid from Spain joining our group in Phuket? He’s the one that made everyone come up to the front to see if they had even legs in the chapter "Holy S#!t in Phuket."

Well, Tall Kid from Spain is back. And he has a bigger role this time around. Let me formally introduce you. Tall Kid From Spain has a name and it is Johnny. Johnny is a confusing person to meet. He is a tall white guy born and raised in Spain. He is ethnically made up of being half British (mom side) and half German (dad side), and while he is fluent in Spanish (as he would be, he was raised there his entire life) when he speaks English he does it without an accent. So you assume he’s American but he’s not, he’s a tall white guy from Spain.

Johnny is scheduled to speak the morning after I have my “Jedi Mind Tricks” experience (see earlier chapter if you don’t get this reference). I volunteer to go and listen to him speak. This is the story of what Johnny shared.

We are now going story within a story. #InceptionGoals

JOHNNY’S STORY: An Atheist's Leg Grows

Johnny was walking around with a friend in Mendocino, CA, when they saw this dude sitting on a bench with those big headphones on. He had a leather jacket and the whole “emo" type look happening. God was highlighting him to Johnny.

Johnny: I wanted to talk to him. I asked God if he would give me a word of knowledge for him.

PAUSE: What is a word of knowledge? A word of knowledge is when God tells you something about a person that you wouldn’t normally have a way of knowing. This can sometimes look like someone knowing a personal detail about you, like your phone number or the name of your mom or even something wild like the dream you had the night before, ETC. Word of knowledge is powerful. It has a way of stopping people in their tracks. Suddenly you are aware that God knows everything about you. He even knows your phone number by heart. 

BACK TO THE STORY.

Johnny asks God for a word of knowledge for Young Atheist

God said “He likes music.” … and Johnny was like “Woooow...geez God thanks.” Not exactly Earth shaking revelation he was hoping for.

But Johnny followed suit and strikes up conversation.

Johnny: “Do you like music?”

Young Atheist: “I do"

And much to Johnny’s surprise it actually opened up this whole conversation. Johnny realized that while this might not be the fancy version he was looking for, it worked. This question about music opened up his heart, they are engaging and sharing. Eventually it led to Johnny bringing up Jesus. 

Young Atheist listened for a second but then stood up and grabbed his backpack to go. “Jesus is cool, man,” he said, "but so is Buddha” 

"All the other gods," Johnny responded, "you have to do something for them. But the only one who did something for you is Jesus.”

And that was exactly when God decided to bring in that fancy touch.

“You had an accident, something happened to your hips and lungs. What happened 4 years ago?” Johnny asked.

Young Atheist looked at him, stunned. “I was on my motorbike on the 4th of July"

And then he proceeded to tell Johnny the story about how he was run over by a truck on that day.

Then Johnny goes, “And there is something about your dad, he died because of drugs?”

Young Atheist was speechless. HOW DO YOU KNOW??

Young Atheist begins to share about how he grew up without his father. How he would always ask family members what happened to him, and they often made up different stories to protect him from the truth. Eventually he caught on, which led to more pain, which eventually led him into drugs himself.

Johnny asked, "Can I pray for you?”

Young Atheist agrees, so they sat him down. Johnny tells him "Keep your eyes open and watch"

Johnny commanded his leg to grow, it shot out. 

When his leg shot out, Young Atheist's knees shifted. They made a sound, like something correcting.

Johnny looked at him with AWE

Young Atheist sat there in disbelief. “No….no…this must be some kind of placebo affect or something.”

SIDEBAR: I feel like this guy doesn’t actually understand what that is because that concept does not logically fit in this scenario. 

RESUME: He was still bargaining. “Maybe I’m imagining this,” he said.

So then Johnny said "OK God, if you're real make the one leg grow longer than the other"

AND BOOM

His left leg shoots out more. It is longer than his right leg.He FREAKS OUT.

Young Atheist started screaming, "Put it back! Put it back! Put it back!"

The leg shot back in, and they were even.

Young Atheist was now VERY open to the idea that there might just in fact be a God.

They talk. He talks about his drug use. They explain to him that Drugs are a counterfeit to the real thing, and asked if he wanted to experience the real thing.

Johnny starts to pray for him, and Young Atheist starts to freak out again. 

“I FEEL A FINGER ON MY BACK”

“I FEEL A FINGER”

“OMG I FEEL AN ENTIRE HAND”

“I FEEL A PALM ON MY BACK!”

Johnny explains to him “That’s Jesus, and He wants to give you a hug."

And right then he felt the hug. Sweet baby Young Atheist begins to weep. He weeps and weeps.

"This thing you´re feeling,” Johnny said, "it’s not a one time event. You can actually keep it. Do you want this?"

Young Atheist yells, "I want this! This is everything I´ve been looking for.” In that moment he accepted Jesus. 

Then God clued Johnny into another word of knowledge

"Is there something wrong with your lungs?” he asked.

Young Former Atheist (see what I did there?) tells Johnny that because of the accident, there was an issue with him being able to breath deeply in and out.

They prayed for him to be healed and suddenly Young Former Atheist, for the first time in years, could take in full, deep breaths.

He was so excited about it he started swearing repeatedly. He screamed out, “F*******ck!” in giddy disbelief. (sound familiar?)

Then Johnny ends by praying for him one last time. As they hug, Johnny tells him, “You’re family now."

******

Back to Bangkok

I'm listening to Johnny tell this story from the stage at a church.

What is up with this leg-growing thing??!!! This is crazy. Has this is just been happening everywhere in the world this whole time?

How have I lived 34 years of my life and never heard of limbs growing? Maybe it’s because I haven’t really been hanging out with people that know Jesus. I am now surrounded by people that seem to really know Him, and they have these incredible stories. Stories that my brain is having a hard time receiving. But this story I GET, because I just saw this very thing with my own eyes a few days ago!

As Johnny’s speaking time comes to a close, he asks everyone to stand. He wants to pray for us.

As I stand up, he’s going around the room praying for people. He comes to me and grabs my right hand. My hand is palm-up and he grabs it in a way that his thumb is in the center of my palm.  I’ll tell you why I think this is interesting in another chapter, (it has to do with Chakras).

Johnny starts to pray for me, but suddenly it is like he is interrupted and he starts to scream. No joke. Not like terrified scream. More like something is pressing down on him and he is still trying to stand up kind of scream. There's a struggle and it's intense. Does that make sense? Probably not. But I tried. 

So I’m standing there with my eyes closed thinking “This guy is being so dramatic.” I felt nothing. He lets go of my hand, stops screaming, and walks away. And I’m about to have a process in my head about these Christians being dramatic and nothing ever happening.

But suddenly, the feeling of fire hit both the palms of my hand. It felt like two sticks of fire inserted themselves into both my hands. I could feel these fire sticks come through the palms of my hands and go up into my arms. 

My arms were burning with hot rods of fire.

And I need you to understand. This was not a warm sensation. This wasn’t a tickle. It was FIRE. It was OTHER WORLDLY. 

HOW COULD THIS BE HAPPENING?!?

I can feel tears coming down my face. Suddenly this thought ran across my mind: “All the stories are true.”

I had always wondered about the Bible. The crazy things in there, did they all really happen or were they just metaphors?

But WHEN YOU HAVE FIRE STICKS IN YOUR ARMS suddenly you’re like YEAH, that dude could have ended up in a whale, that virgin got pregnant, those dudes walked out of a furnace and escaped being burned alive. You feel like anything could definitely be possible.

Even more than that, these stories that I have been hearing all my life, these testimonies of people swearing “Jesus is real,” “He healed me,” all these implausible testimonies that I had been hearing the entire trip, they now all seemed like they could be true.

It felt like magic. 
Not in a Harry Potter way.
But in a, there is something else going on that we can’t see and now I feel like anything is possible, kind of magic.

I ended up on the ground crying uncontrollably with my fire rod arms for who knows how long. And then poof. It just stopped.

But now, I am transformed. 
This is a turning point for me.
I believe. 

Some of you may say, “But Lindsey, you saw that leg grow. You saw things about people’s pasts and futures and images flash before your eyes. You saw a microphone literally floating over someone’s head. Didn’t you believe then?" 

See, I did but I didn’t. I still had this thing, these thoughts talking me out of it. The leg didn’t really grow, it moved funny. Seeing all that stuff, maybe those were lucky guesses? Intuition? Or did I do too many drugs after all and I’m hallucinating?

But FIRE.

Fire, almost violently, searing into my arms from somewhere that I couldn't see. 

The supernatural element of it is arresting, to say the least. It has a way of stopping you in your tracks. Rearranging your brain. It’s hard to reason your way in and out of that because you are experiencing it in the physical.

If this was a movie moment, I would have the camera panning around me with the instrumental version of Prodigy’s “Firestarter” as the score.

The beginning of “Firestarter” is violent. The drums hit, and that "wah wah" affected guitar riff comes careening in like a hurricane, wild, sharp, sudden and in your face dramatic.

It’s kind of like when the manifest presence of God shows up, it’s like a wrecking ball, walls come crushing down, false realities get obliterated, lineages get ROCKED.

In one moment, everything changed for me. Not just my heart and mind, but my destiny. I will never be the same. Time is being altered because my future looks different now. Other people’s futures are looking different now too because mine has been altered. 

That’s how this works. 
We affect each other. 

I was affected by Hanna inviting me on this trip, by Johnny praying for me, by the story of that Young Former Atheist in Mendocino who I never met, and many others that got me to this point. What you do isn’t always just for you.

I know that there are some weird lyrics in that song [that’s why I said “the instrumental”]

But there is a part in that first line that sums up the Holy Spirit's affect on people perfectly.

HE IS THE FIRESTARTER, HE IS THE INSTIGATOR. 

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