Five Moments From a Decade of Ministry

C.K. was twenty-four years old the first time he watched a man’s arthritis leave his hands.

It happened on a street corner, praying with a stranger the way he’d begun praying with strangers by then, plain and unglamorous, though nothing about what happened next felt plain to him. The man was maybe sixty, hands curled tight with the particular ache of decades spent doing something with them that had worn the joints down past what they were built to carry. C.K. took those hands without ceremony, prayed for less than a minute in a voice that never rose above conversation, and watched the man’s fingers straighten in real time, slow and then all at once, the way ice lets go of a window when the sun finally reaches it.

It didn’t stop there. He prayed for a woman’s leg not long after, one noticeably shorter than the other since an old accident, and felt it move under his own hand while he prayed, lengthening in the space of a single held breath. He didn’t fully understand what he was watching. He simply watched it happen, and kept praying, because that was the only response available to him that felt honest.

For a while, it seemed like it all worked exactly the way C.K. wanted it to, every time, without exception. He was young enough in the calling to believe faith functioned like a formula, the right words plus the right belief equaling the outcome a person needed. That belief cost him something he never fully got back, and it happened on an ordinary afternoon, sitting beside a young woman he calls Sarah now, her real name lost to him over the years, who was dying of lung cancer, called to her side because a relative had heard him pray for someone else’s healing months before.

He drove out to see her certain, entirely certain, that he was about to watch God do for her what he’d watched God do for a man’s hands and a woman’s leg. He taught her how to pray the way he understood prayer at the time, how to hold her faith steady against what the doctors were telling her, and they prayed together, certain the whole time that the outcome was already decided in their favor.

Sarah died eleven days later.

C.K. carried that failure the way a man carries a stone he isn’t allowed to set down, turning it over for months afterward, reading Scripture until the pages blurred, searching for the flaw in his own faith that must have caused the outcome he’d been so certain wouldn’t come. He never fully found what he was looking for. What he found instead, slowly and painfully, was something both smaller and larger than the answer he’d wanted.

It takes a God kind of faith to move some mountains, not a man’s faith borrowed and stretched to fit a situation he wants resolved a certain way. Some outcomes were his to shape through obedience and prayer. Others belonged entirely to a will he didn’t get to see clearly, no matter how hard he searched the pages for a formula that would let him see it. That single experience reshaped everything about how he carried his faith afterward. He stopped walking into rooms already certain of the outcome. He started asking first, sometimes for days, what he was actually meant to do in a given situation, rather than assuming every outcome was his to decide the same way. It became, over time, the difference between using faith like a tool a man owns and serving something considerably larger than himself.

The highway incident happened a few years later, on a stretch of two-lane road late enough at night that C.K. had the road entirely to himself, or believed he did.

He’d prayed before he left the house that evening, the way he’d learned to pray before doing almost anything by then, asking simply that God would put angels around him for protection on the drive. He’d said some version of that prayer countless times before without ever having a reason to think it mattered in any way he could point to directly. That night, it mattered in a way he never forgot.

A car pulled out ahead of him without warning, crossing directly into his lane and stopping there. He was doing fifty-five. He saw it too late to stop, the math of speed and distance collapsing into something his body understood a full second before his mind caught up to it, and in that single second, C.K. made a choice that still doesn’t entirely make sense to him even now.

He took his foot off the brake.

It wasn’t recklessness. It was closer to the opposite of recklessness, a decision built on the same trust that had cost him so much in that hospice room, the same trust that had taught him some outcomes weren’t his to force through sheer effort. He looked at the car ahead of him, close enough now to make out a shape in the passenger seat, and in the space between one heartbeat and the next, the car simply wasn’t there anymore.

It reappeared, he confirmed by driving the distance out the following morning, almost exactly half a mile down the road, parked calmly on the shoulder as though it had been sitting there the entire time.

C.K. doesn’t tell that story often, and never tells it without feeling the same disorienting mixture of gratitude and fear that gripped him in the moment itself. He didn’t understand the mechanics of what happened that night, and he learned by then not to need to understand every mechanic in order to trust what he’d witnessed. He’d asked for protection. He received something considerably larger than protection, and he has carried the memory of that night into every difficult season since, a quiet certainty that the request he made once on a dark highway never actually stopped being answered.

Not every lesson came wrapped in that kind of weight.

C.K. served in the Air Force before any of this began, working outdoors in the kind of heat that made a man understand exactly why some jobs get called work in the first place. He hated the outdoor shifts more than he ever admitted to anyone in his unit, and one particularly brutal afternoon, sweating through his uniform under a sky without a single cloud in it, he prayed, half joking and half desperate, that the Lord might see fit to send a storm strong enough to pull the whole flight line indoors.

Twenty minutes later, out of a sky that had shown no sign of rain all morning, the storm broke hard enough to shut down every outdoor operation on the base.

He tried it again two weeks later, same clear sky, same half-serious prayer, and the storm came again, close enough behind the prayer that even C.K., young and still mostly unaware of what he actually carried, felt a chill move through him that had nothing to do with the rain.

He tried a third time. This time, no storm came. Instead, in the quiet that followed his prayer, C.K. felt something settle into his chest that he later understood was correction rather than silence, a clear, unmistakable sense that he was not to ask for that particular favor again. He never did. It taught him something he carried into every year of ministry that followed, a lesson considerably lighter than the hospice room but no less permanent for its lightness. God answers prayer because a person asks. That doesn’t mean every request deserves an answer, and a wise man learns early which requests to leave alone.

The deliverance ministry itself started small, built out of nothing more complicated than a handful of people C.K. trusted and a shared understanding that the work didn’t require anyone to be standing in the same room to matter.

They worked by telecommunications, praying for people an ocean away with the same seriousness C.K. had once brought to a stranger on a street corner. Most of the time, the deliverance came complete, clean breaks he could hear happen in real time, a person’s voice changing on the other end of the line.

Sometimes it didn’t come complete. C.K. prayed for a man in an asylum overseas once, across as many months as sessions, and the result was a partial release, enough to give the man back some measure of himself without fully closing what had been opened in him decades earlier. He carried that case the way he carried the hospice room, a reminder that some doors resist closing all the way no matter how faithfully a person works at them.

By then, C.K. had learned to walk into any fight without the false certainty that had cost him so much years earlier. He learned instead to carry the harder, truer thing this whole road had taught him: obedience first, results second, and the humility to understand that not every outcome ends the way a man prays it will, even when he prays with everything he has.