I went home after my Discipleship Training School with the plan of coming back to Kona and staffing the next year. Then, as time passed, I started to feel like I wasn’t ready for it. During this time, I had a dream that made me reconsider. In the dream I was on the deck of a ship, looking out to the land. We were in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and I was watching what I knew to be my students and outreach co-leader. They were on the land, praying over a baby that had just been born, but was not breathing. They were saying, “Help, help!”
I woke up and thought, “Ok. Maybe that’s my confirmation I need to go to PNG.”
I asked the Lord to give me more confirmation and, sure enough, I had the same dream for two more nights in a row. I knew I needed to go.
I came back a year after being a student and knew that I needed to lead an outreach to PNG. I settled into staffing and was assigned my outreach team. The plan was to go to PNG but there was an issue with our visas. Our backup plan was to go to the Philippines, instead.
I had told people about my dream and everyone believed we needed to be there. All the other teams were getting ready but we still didn’t have our visas. We just kept believing. I knew we had to be on that ship. The night before the last of the teams were leaving, we finally got our visas. We booked our tickets and left the next day!
During our outreach, every morning when I woke up, the Lord would say to me, “Keep believing for this promise, keep believing for this promise.” We partnered with YWAM Ships Kona for the outreach and we served aboard their vessel Pacific Link for about seven weeks. On the seventh week, God spoke to me about the dream.
There was a storm that had caused us to leave where we were anchored and sail to the other side of the island – to a place called Kandrian. The first day we were there, I woke up and instantly heard God say: “Today is the day your dream comes true.”
I was scheduled to be on the ship that day, so I felt disappointed that I would not be on the island. Then God reminded me of my dream and how I was sitting on the deck while my whole team was on land, not me. God asked me, “Rachel, are your prayers enough for you? If you can’t be there in person with this happening, is it enough for you that you can at least pray?” So I sat on the deck, praying, watching, and believing for it to happen.
Later in the day, I joined a group going ashore in a zodiac. We were on shore briefly and were getting ready to return when my outreach co-leader ran up to me and said, “Rachel, the baby was born! Go!” She pointed me towards where it was and I ran.
When I got there my whole team was sitting outside the clinic where the baby had been born, praying. Then the doctor came out and said the baby had started breathing! The doctor told us the baby had choked and didn’t have a pulse for 15 minutes. My dream had come true.
I got to sit down with the mother the next day and share my story. We pinpointed things back to nine months before, when I first had the dream. I had been praying for this woman and her baby from conception to birth. I also realized that I had almost died in a very similar situation when I was born. God was at work in the details.
When I told the mother about my dream, she was very emotional. She appeared to be on her own, with no husband. Hearing about the dream hugely comforted her because she could see how this baby was not a mistake and that God cared for her and her child.
Rachel Friesz