By Victoria Fassett
Campus Minister
UNL Newman Center
Happy Easter! He is Risen! These past few weeks as we’ve been celebrating the Easter season, I’ve been drawn to the accounts of the early Christians from the Acts of the Apostles.
For much of my life, I’ve heard these stories and have thought of them as just that, stories. They easily become something that happened a long time ago or something that only happens to saints. But this Easter, I’ve been challenged to really consider what it would mean if the Holy Spirit wanted to work these miracles in my life and the lives of the people around me.
The weekend after Easter, we invited students from the Newman Center and a few other campuses on the FOCUS Spiritual Impact Bootcamp Retreat to come to know the Holy Spirit in a deeper way and invite Him to work in and through them. As I was preparing for the weekend, I came back repeatedly to the fourteenth chapter of John where Jesus says to His disciples, “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I go to the Father.”
Immediately my mind tries to understand how it is possible that he promises his disciples that they will do even greater works than what they have seen him do. What could be greater than what he has done? He has raised people from the dead, healed the sick, given sight to the blind, and softened the hardest of hearts. I found myself praying, “Jesus what could it mean that those who believe in you, that I, will do ‘greater works than these?’”
After days of hearing about what the apostles’ lives looked like after Easter and Pentecost, it’s so clear that Jesus wants to continue His ministry through me, through us, through the Church.
In Acts, chapter 5, we see people bringing their loved ones into the streets so that Peter’s shadow might fall on them and heal them. In Acts 12, Peter is led out of prison by an angel and then in Acts 16, Paul and Silas are miraculously released from prison and the guard and his whole family become Christians in the process. And then in Acts 28, Paul is bitten by a viper and is not harmed.
But it doesn’t stop there—last year I was at a conference and there was a man standing behind me whose left leg was 3 inches shorter than his right leg. A couple of men in their early 20s came up and asked if they could pray with him. After a few minutes, they wrapped up their prayer for healing and he stood up and his leg was healed—it had grown 3 inches through the power of their prayer.
During the Bootcamp retreat this semester, one girl experienced the healing of a pain in her hip that she’s lived with for a long time, and another girl experienced complete healing of her stomach issues after her friends prayed with her.
Just last week, one of the students on the retreat was talking to a friend of his who was struggling with the truths of the Catholic faith and he offered to pray with her. As tears started streaming down her face, she admitted to feeling much more peace and confidence in the Church.
We invite students on this retreat because Jesus really means that we will do “greater works than these’’ and invites each of us, His disciples, to be His hands and feet. It’s incredible to realize that Jesus truly desires our healing, whether physical, emotional or spiritual, and, even more than that, to transform our humanity into the vessel that carries His love and healing to a deeply broken world.
