Written by Emma Freeman This is Natalie Blessed Favour. She’s part of an intercession group, who regularly pray for Israel and prayed for our team. They honoured us by buying us dinner. We shared testimonies, danced and prayed together. The first thing you notice when you meet her is the joy and life she exudes. She knows deep rejection, physical suffering and poverty, yet far from feeling sorry for herself, she punctuates the suffering in her story with spontaneous praise and acknowledgement of the goodness of God towards her. In 1965 she became sick with cancer of the uterus. She had 5 unsuccessful operations in an attempt to deal with it. At one point she spent a month and a half in hospital as they drained the discharge from her abdomen. She could go for two weeks without eating, so they fed her via a tube and hydrated her intravenously. She told me “my relatives got tired of me because they said ‘she has not died, but she does not live, so she is useless to us’ but I thank God for the nurses and the doctors because God used them to take care of me.” For 29 years Blessed Favour suffered with the cancer. Despite her condition, she cared for orphans and widows. She would collect food for them and buy rotten meat with the little money they had. “I was in hell when I was alive and I was rotten when I was alive....and on top of that I was very poor. I used to collect food from the dusty bin. I would pick it and wash it and boil it with salt water to eat it...the pain was terrible and I feared being around people because the flies would come around me because of the discharge...But I thank God that someone preached the gospel to me” “The doctors had failed, my people had given up...Then they preach to me. I hate balokole (born again Christians) I don’t like them. They say ‘try Jesus, you will not remain the same, you will become a new person.” However, she decided to give Him a try and went to church that Sunday. At the church they called for people who wanted to surrender their lives to Jesus, so she went forward. She felt something ‘dressing her up’ with power. The pain stopped instantly as did the flow of discharge, which she could also feel. She said she waited a week, then a month, then a year passed without pain or discharge. Its now its been 23 years, the cancer has not returned and she is about to celebrate her 70th birthday healthy and full of life. Before she was saved, her name was Akelo, which means ‘devil has bought’. Now she is known as Natalie Blessed Favour. She loves telling people about what Jesus has done for her and for us. She prays for the sick, who get healed and she now has many children despite the damage the cancer caused. We were privileged to meet & pray with one of the orphans who is now her daughter. “I had no son or daughter because the cancer had spoiled the productive system but I thank God for Isaiah 54!” “Sing, barren one, who has not given birth. burst into singing and shout, you who have not travailed. For more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married one,” says Adonai. Isaiah 54:1
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