A Miraculous Story

By Andy Miller, Mission Partner to Costa Rica.

 

My wife Shona sensed the call to global mission at 12 years old at her home church in Auck­land. In her 20’s she did mission trips to Tan­zania and Colom­bia. I grew up as a son of British mis­sion­ar­ies in Peru and we later met in Spain in 1999. We bonded over our shared exper­i­ence living in Latin America during very dan­ger­ous times. Shona had always had a con­vic­tion that she would marry some­body with a passion for global mission and he would decide where we would go. Our ques­tion at the time though was “Where?”

I met a key leader from the Middle East and asked him how I could stra­tegic­ally serve the Muslim world. Without flinch­ing he gave me an answer that changed my life.

“Andy with your back­ground and bilin­gual­ism, mobil­ise the church in Latin America!

This one con­ver­sa­tion mobil­ised me. I married Shona in London in 2000 and we moved to New Zealand in 2001 to start a family. We thought that after 2–5 years God would call us to be part of facil­it­at­ing a mis­sional move­ment from Latin America to the unreached nations.

Upside Down

At that time I felt God had told me it was not time to leave but to work on my char­ac­ter as I had been strug­gling to control my emo­tions for a few years. Unfor­tu­nately, I just didn’t know how bad it really was. In 2002 my life was turned upside down when I was dia­gnosed with bipolar dis­order. In that instant, despite the strong sense of calling Shona and I had received, I dis­qual­i­fied myself for service in global mission. How could I take my family to a foreign country away from our support struc­tures if I was emo­tion­ally unstable? So I decided that we would serve in the church in New Zealand.

In 2005 I received a very strange proph­etic word. A friend of mine said to me “Andy, some­body is going to give you a pair of shoes and it will be a sign to you that you will travel across many nations with a message from God.” I thought it was weird at the time but it impacted me and I held onto it.

After spend­ing some time serving as youth pastors in Taur­anga, we moved to Christ­ch­urch in 2009 and I made a serious attempt to under­stand the bipolar dia­gnosis, research­ing with doctors, Chris­tian coun­sel­lors, and psy­chi­at­rists. What fol­lowed were some of the hardest years of my life. I had ter­rible side effects from all the med­ic­a­tion and even went on the sick­ness benefit for a time. We got to the point where my medical team and I agreed that it wasn’t working and in 2013 I came off all my med­ic­a­tion slowly.

I felt like I had no solu­tion. My mood swings wouldn’t stop and every three weeks I battled with sui­cidal think­ing. During this period Shona started train­ing as a teacher and I became the house husband, looking after the kids, working part-time, and serving at church in the children’s min­istry and small groups. Again, I felt dis­qual­i­fied from global mission and quite ashamed.

The Miracle

In 2015, I was invited by my friend Gabriel, to a meeting run by a healing evan­gel­ist named Susan Pil­lains who was vis­it­ing from England. I didn’t want to go but I knew Gabriel wanted me to trans­late and was hoping I would be healed. Gabriel is a pas­sion­ate inter­cessor and over the years he had prayed with many tears for God to heal me. I had exper­i­enced God’s healing over the years in other ways, but it had been 14 years since my bipolar dia­gnosis, God had not healed me and I was feeling a little jaded. I decided to attend the meeting, telling Shona I would change my attitude.

It turned out Susan had an amazing min­istry with mira­cu­lous healing meet­ings across India and Africa. She began to pray for me but after a couple of times of com­mand­ing the sick­ness to leave, I apo­lo­get­ic­ally said to her that I felt no dif­fer­ent. She asked if we could pray and wait on God. So we did and I stood there with my hands stretched out before me as she quietly prayed. After about ten minutes Susan said she believe God told her that my illness had been passed down to be me from pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions. So she began to meth­od­ic­ally go through my family gen­er­a­tions one by one, asking Jesus to release me from any sick­ness that had begun there. When she counted to the eighth gen­er­a­tion I sud­denly col­lapsed on the floor and began to scream!

I am not going to give you more of an explan­a­tion or an inter­pret­a­tion of this story because I simply cannot. I can only tell you the story as it happened. All I can say is as Susan prayed, the power of God began moving in my life in a way that was beyond my understanding.

After a while, Susan began to pray for peace and said “I think some­thing sig­ni­fic­ant has happened.”

I replied, “I think so too.”

I knew it would be very easy to check because for the past 20 years I hadn’t gone three weeks without facing a cycle of uncon­trol­lable depres­sion and elation.

From that day on March 8, 2015, the mood swings stopped. One Chris­tian psy­cho­lo­gist told me that’s impossible as a bipolar dia­gnosis is incur­able. However, I know what I was like then and I know what has changed and there is no way I would be taking my family to a foreign country and away from our support net­works if God had not healed me. A miracle had happened.

The Shoes

In June of 2015, I was invited to speak at a com­bined service. I was at the church social event on a Monday night and the Pastor, Pastor Jorge, decided to pray for some people. All of a sudden the social event became a min­istry time and he began to pray for me. Incred­ibly he said that I would have a min­istry trav­el­ling across Latin America and coun­tries where Chris­ti­ans faced persecution.

“Like the valleys are raised up and the moun­tains are lowered and the favour of God goes before you and you are walking in some shoes…” Then all of a sudden he slowed down for a bit before con­tinu­ing. “Like my ones…” He stopped for a few seconds again. Finally, he said “This is going to sound very odd to you. But I believe the Holy Spirit is saying that I am to give you these shoes and they will be a sign to you that this will come true.”

I couldn’t believe it. That was it! When I got home I chatted to Shona and within a month I had resigned from my job.

Jesus’ Scars

John 20:20 and 20:21 have been a theme for me over the last couple of years. Jesus enters a room where the dis­ciples were hidden away from the world for fear of death. Jesus sur­prises the dis­ciples and meets them at a point when they had been blind­sided by the unex­pec­ted. They had been rav­ished by the trauma of the death of their hero, the hero that most of them had aban­doned. All were over­whelmed by their cir­cum­stance and totally baffled by the appar­ent news of the resur­rec­tion of Christ. And then, sud­denly, he appeared to them.

Jesus showed them his hands and he said “As the father has sent me, I am sending you”. Jesus shows them the scars of wounds that should have declared his demise but now pro­claimed his victory. I believe this point is rel­ev­ant to all of us. God sends us fully aware of our weak­nesses, frailties, insec­ur­it­ies, and our quirks. And yet God still calls us to go and be an incarn­a­tion of the Gospel to the world.

Andy and Shona have been Mission Part­ners with NZCMS since 2017. They work with Pro-meta (an online Chris­tian uni­ver­sity) to train leaders and work along­side mis­sional organ­isa­tions across Latin America to Mobil­ize the church into the call of God. Andy and Shona believe pas­sion­ately that Latin America can be a power­house to accom­plish the great com­mis­sion among the remain­ing 7000 unreached ethnic groups around the world.