Miracle Halls has begun! Woooooo Hooooooooo 🥳🙌 I’m (Janet) going to tell you all about it in a minute, but I need to fill you in a little with a bit of backstory first.

A lovely thing that has begun to take root in Neil & I over the last couple of years is a greater desire than ever to walk in obedience with the Lord. It’s worth mentioning that we’ve never sought to be disobedient previously, but as we’ve shared here a lot, we have heard God speak so clearly that obedience to His every instruction is the main thing on this whole journey, and so we are making it more and more the lens through which we approach everything we’re doing!

So, from not really talking much about Miracle Halls for months, over the last month we’ve been sharing the vision of Miracle Halls with you all, our theonehundredyearsproject prayer team, and our church. That’s both been fun and a little scary because now that it’s out there it feels more real!!! From doing this, some amazing people have signed up to be on the team for Miracle Halls, and so we were able to kick off the very first one on Wednesday. We literally had no idea what was going to happen – there could have been loads of people come in, or nobody at all, we just didn’t know!!

The reason I describe this obedience journey as ‘lovely’ is because what has begun to happen is as we have pushed more and more into this way of thinking and living, pressure has been lifted off our shoulders to be viewed as successful. I don’t even necessarily mean pressure from anyone in particular, although there’s a little bit of that, but more a weight we didn’t even realize we were carrying before of needing to do things a certain way in order to appear like we were doing it ‘right.’ Does that make sense?

All of that to say, as we drove to Miracle Halls for the first time on Wednesday, we didn’t feel worried at all about whether people would turn up or not 😃 We believe the Lord has invited us to start this, and so our role in that is to be obedient to His voice – and then He can do whatever He would like with that ❤️ So, while we were a little nervous because we’d never done Miracle Halls before, we mostly felt expectant and excited about getting the opportunity to give our ‘yes’ to Jesus in this way 🥳🙌

When we arrived, our church school of mission was just finishing up in the community center, so we jumped in with them for the last few minutes, and then they headed off into town to offer to pray for some people! Whenever they finished up and headed out, a few of our team came along, and we were able to have some time to pray and chat together before any guests might arrive, and also get the room set up! It was so much fun getting things ready and seeing this dream become a reality – I loved it 🥳❤️

Then we all took up our positions and waited…and waited….and in week one of Miracle Halls…

Nobody came in 😂👍

Our team is incredible and so they still prayed in the room for miracles for each other, and a couple of people headed up through the community to chat with people they bumped into. Those guys got to meet some great people and let them know we’d be around each week – and the people seemed happy about that which is fab! I got to stand just outside the front door with a couple more of our team to be welcomers if people did come along. That was fun to chat with them, and actually about halfway through, someone who was doing a bit of work at the community centre came out and we had a great chat with them for the rest of the time which was brilliant! They’re going to be working there a fair bit when we’re using the hall, and so we had the opportunity to let them know we would love to pray with them if they would ever find that helpful. They were thankful and happy to just chat for the first day! We got quickly tidied up at the end and then headed home.

And happily, our feelings of ‘it doesn’t matter if there are 100 people or none, we just want to be obedient’ didn’t leave us 😃 It can only be the Lord, because we didn’t feel discouraged that nobody came in – we felt obedient and expectant for what God has in His heart for that community going forward!! And we are so aware that in just showing up and praying in that space, spiritually, things are shifting all the time, which is very exciting too!!

So that was week one!!! We’re excited to be off and running, and we pray that over these next weeks God will bring people across our paths who need His love and life-changing power to break into their lives ❤️