I stood on the round cement table directly in the middle of the small triangle park area in between three roads. The night air was comfortably warm as I looked up to the stars in the sky and shouted the name of Jesus.
How on earth did I get to this moment? Me, the quiet reserved one, shouting God’s name into the night. Less than an hour before, I had been quietly walking along the streets of Cancun, praying in my head for the city. I was tired and feeling a spiritual heaviness.
On Sunday afternoon, the team decided to prayer walk through part of Cancun. We headed out and began walking the streets, but we were strangely quiet. Only Michele and Keisha were praying out loud.
We arrived at a karaoke bar and Michele sensed the need to stop and pray. This was a place where, a couple nights earlier, Keisha had given a rose to a prostitute standing outside. We started to pray, despite our tiredness.
Keisha and Michele asked if anything was wrong, and we started to discuss what we were feeling. All of us felt a heaviness. As Aaron described it, we were not on holy ground anymore, and we could feel it. At our team house, God’s praise was sung on a regular basis. But here, on the rundown streets of Cancun, it was not. We could physically feel the difference.
As we decided what to do, Keisha felt God wanted us to do a joyful act. Something not only for us, as a fight against the heaviness, but for the karaoke bar as well, since it was not a place of real joy.
Both Keisha and I knew what act of joy God wanted us to do – sing a children’s song about loving Jesus while performing the accompanying, silly actions. And so we did it.
“I love my Jesus, deep down in my soul!” we sang. “I love my Jesus deep down in my soul! I’m talking about deep, deep, deep down. Deep, deep, deep down. Hold us! Wait a minute! Arms out!”
By the time we finished going through all the actions, we were all grinning and laughing so hard. The heaviness was gone! We felt so much lighter! We continued on our prayer walk, this time engaged and praying aloud.
A few minutes later, we arrived at the small grassy park filling in the section between the roads. God was with us, and we couldn’t help but call out to His great name!