February 1st, our last night in Veracruz, the team went out to a fancy restaurant to eat out as a group. As we were waiting to eat, one of the girls named Jessie saw a man slip and fall and hit his head on the rocks by the water. I ran outside to make sure he was okay, and another student named Nathan Mcmahon followed close behind me to help out. We hopped the railing down onto the large rocks and reached the man to see if he was okay. He was standing but could not keep his balance on the rocks at all; he was having immense trouble standing. Me and Nathan ran down to him and grabbed him by the arms and helped him to walk up the rocks. I was worried that he suffered from brain damage so I started asking him questions like “what’s your name?”, “where do you live?”, and “do you have family?”. He still could not stand well but he started answering me in English and said that his name was Jose-Manuel-Hernan-(I don’t remember the last name). At first I did not notice that he was speaking in English but then I realized and was actually very impressed at his fluency! We sat him down and kept talking with him, asking him what he had been doing (drinking) and why he was walking down by the rocks. We found out that his father had died in the water (he did not answer us how or how long ago it was), and he was really torn up about this death. From what he was saying, we think that he was actually on the verge of wanting to kill himself.
We started talking to him about another Father that he had, and what HE thought about him, and God started revealing to me good character traits that this man has like his generosity and love for people. We sat there for a long time just talking with him as he cycled between crying, yelling, and laughing. At one point he said that GOD was the one who commanded the death of his dad, but we got to reveal that lie in the light and tell him that God is the one who wants to give him life again and hope. He was responding really well to this and we could see the stuff we were saying slowly hitting home with him. But at this point it got kind of strange.
A number of times while we were talking with him, he kept saying “I do not speak English, I do not speak English”, but he WAS speaking English very well so we kept on telling him that he was really good! But another thing that he kept saying was “I cannot understand you up here (pointing to his head), but I understand you in here (pointing to his heart.)” It didn’t really compute what was going on until this point.
We asked him if we could pray for him and immediately he started doing some sort of a chant, shut his eyes and did some multi-tonal humming thing like monks would do. We both knew that some spiritual warfare was happening so we started praying for him right there. While we were praying, I was standing in front of him and he opened his eyes and looked right at me, so I kept praying for him looking right at him until he slowly started to come back under control and seemed to have a new peace about him. He was sobered up, and was now able to stand on his own without losing his balance.
The strange thing though was that although he was now sober and his equilibrium was restored, his ability to speak English was slowly going away. His fluency changed to him not being able to understand simple phrases like “did you walk here?” Normally I would be worried about brain damage, but then we remembered how earlier he had kept saying, “I don’t speak English, I don’t speak English.” And then we realized that we think God gave him supernatural comprehension of English while he was drunk that went away as he was being restored.
We kept on talking with him with our broken Spanish and asked him how he felt. He could not remember falling on the rocks, but he had no pain in his head and he remembered key points in our conversation with him in English about God and the love that He has for His children. He said that he loved us and kept saying “Dios te bendiga, Dios te bendiga (God bless you).” Nathan had some money on him and we used that to buy Jose a taxi home.
A crazy and majorly confusing story, but I know that God worked in it!
It's currently friday morning, and I head back to Colorado tomorrow to spend a week back at the base and then I'll be home the 12th! I can't wait to see you guys again.
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