When you prayed did it ever work?

[FallentoReason]

YES, EXACTLY! Also, faith without works is dead. This is the entire reason why my church is a missionary church that prepares teams and sends them off to countries where they have established a relationship with the people. My team couldn't have been more sincere in our reasons for going to Thailand. I'll have you know that the healing topic we're discussing in conjunction with my missions trip is but a small fragment of what we set off to do. The healing was just part of the preaching, the loving, the witnessing, the providing that we were there for.

See, if we hypothetically say God exists, then I think all that you have said previously to the bit I quoted leads up to the bit I've quoted. I never considered myself a "healer" either, just a faithful servant with the light of the world inside of me, which needed to be shared with the rest of God's unsaved people. To do that, I need to get myself over to where the people are in need, hence my decision to go on that missions trip.

So was your mission trip a success or failure because no one got healed?

If you went to Thailand to serve God as a faith without works is dead, then a biblically grounded faith says any oppertunity taken to serve God is a sucessful way to serve. Only a toxic faith says one has to manifest a gift like the ablity to heal someone on demand, in a far away land to serve God.

If you can not honestly say your mission was a sucess just by the service you were able to provide by the gifts other than healing that you all had before you got there, then it is easy to conclude that you were not there to serve God. But to leverage/buy a spiritual gift. Something as the book of Acts points out, will not be honored by God.

Well, on a broader spectrum, I can say the mission was a success because we got to hand out the packages we assembled for the people we visited. That was in essence priority one. In terms of the "Christian" side of things (i.e. the witnessing etc.), I have to say not one God-related incident happened. To put this another way: we might as well have been representatives of any of these atheist charities and it wouldn't have made the slightest difference to the outcome.