Changing Pain into Ministry
It can be safely said God wasted little time with Jerri Jenkins. Shortly after giving her life to Jesus, Jerri found herself on a long and painful path that often had her asking why, only to learn she would not receive the answer until she was ready - ready to both hear it and to act on it.
Jerri Jenkins gave her life to Christ 15 years ago at the Church of Perfecting Ministry in Maple Heights, Ohio. Shortly after being baptized at a Baptist church, Jerri was invited to a friend's church to hear Juanita Bynum preach. At that event, a guest pastor from the Church of Perfecting Ministry came straight toward her, "over pews" in Jerri's words, and laid hands on her. "Before that, I thought the laying of hands was a gimmick, but I felt this electricity in me, flowing through me." These events brought joy to a period that had its share of trying moments. A single mother raising three children, Jerri had to provide for them while also facing the normal trials that come with raising children. But things were about to get harder.
Roughly a year after being saved, Jerri began having pains in her abdomen. Soon after trips to various doctors became a regular part of her schedule. They tried colonoscopies, X-rays, MRI's, and ultrasounds, but could not find the problem. "They would often send me home with some Tylenol 3's," Jerri recalled. "Maybe they figured it was all in my head."
For the next four years Jerri estimated she made 200 trips to the emergency room, going an average of once per week. Eventually Jerri reached her limit. "One time I said ‘Lord, I can't do this anymore.' Everything inside me had given up." God knew it, for He spoke to Jerri, but what He said to her was unexpected. "I heard the Lord tell me to go to the emergency room," Jerri said. Like so many of us, Jerri found herself questioning God when He told her to do something that, in her mind, made no sense at all. "But I have, so many times," she pleaded. Jerri recalls heading to her couch to lie down. "I felt a big, huge hand and a sense of warmth come over me. Over and over again I heard the words 'Remove, remove.'" "The pain had stopped." That certainly got Jerri's attention, so she heeded God's initial instruction to go back to an emergency room that had proved unhelpful so many times before.
This time they found the cause right away. A gallstone had lodged itself in her abdomen. In a follow-up visit, her doctor explained sometimes the gallstones hide behind organs, making them hard to detect. "I believed that's when God had moved it forward for me," Jerri said. If this was the end of Jerri's story it would be powerful enough, but God was only getting started in Jerri's life.
During those four painful years, God was preparing Jerri for something bigger. "God was growing compassion in me, one I guess I never had before," she said. Jerri could not work, yet she never fell behind on her rent and living expenses. She spent her days in prayer, for hours at a time, in a prayer room which God directed her to dress up like a bride. Visitors told her they could feel the anointing in that room. People were saved in that room. People were delivered in that room. Although she did not know it at the time, God was preparing Jerri for a healing ministry.
Jerri goes to gas stations, restaurants, grocery stores and parking lots, wherever her daily routine takes her, and God leads her to pray for people and to lay hands on them. People were getting healed. It was in that prayer room that God gave Jerri a vision of people with canes, others in wheelchairs, and some with casts. Soon after Jerri went to a restaurant after church and when she walked in, there they were the people God told her to expect. Jerri had prayed for the manager's son and he got healed, so the manager let her visit with the diners and ask if she could pray for them. One in particular had a very powerful experience. "One lady was sitting in front with her walker and I started praying for her hip that was broken. I laid hands on her and she started screaming in the restaurant. 'I can feel it, I can feel it!' She put her walker to the side and began walking back and forth through the restaurant."
I asked Jerri to go back to those four years, to share a scripture that helped her through. She immediately said Isaiah 53:5: "But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed."
