Our first journey to Pakistan

I am a full-time homemaker and home-school "mom" and dad since my wife passed away in May of 2011. I've been heavily involved with practical ministry, with all kinds of things going on right here in Massachusetts.

So why on earth would I go to Pakistan, of all places, and with my two youngest children?

After I befriended an 18 year-old contact in Pakistan by the name of Jamshaid Akhtar, through a connection via Skype, he explained what they were doing there, and asked me to help them financially and come there to visit.

His father, Javied, was the head of CSF ("Christian Soul Foundation") in Lahore, Pakistan, an outreach to children, many orphans, and their parents, of a brick kiln factory labor camp. These families, including children and orphans, would work maybe 14 hours a day or more making bricks by hand. They lived at the factory in makeshift living quarters with no running water or toilet facilities, making the bricks themselves, from gathering mud, water, and sand, all the way to carrying the sun-dried bricks to the oven; they would deliver finished bricks to the factory owners, earning the equivalent of about USD $2.00 for 1000 bricks, a hard day's work for a family.

(Click on any photographs in this web page to enlarge.) /

The CSF ministry website is https://csfpakistan.webs.com.

In December, 2013, the brick kiln factory that CSF was reaching out to was closed and the site demolished, because the owner's contract ran out. CSF started a primary school for children at the site in a rented facility, to teach these children to read and write in Urdu and English, giving them an education and hope for the future. In Pakistan there are no free schools, public or private. Schooling is too expensive for many people, and the illiteracy rates are high among both children and adults.

So 18 year-old Jamshaid Akhtar and his 54 year-old father, Javied, also a recent widower, asked me to come visit them. I had given them some money already, but to actually go there?? This I argued with God about for about 2 months. After all, I had plenty of mission and outreach opportunities and activities going on right here in Massachusetts. After all, I was busy at home, where our six children still live. After all, if I could afford to spend that much for commercial airline tickets for myself and my two youngest children, plus plenty of other associated international travel expenses, why not just give that money to them instead? After all, I had never been outside of the U.S. before, and did not have a passport, let alone visas to such a country. After all, I had problems with the heat, was accustomed to New England weather, air conditioned comfort, American toilet facilities, and other things.

As usual, God wins all arguments.

I got myself and my two youngest boys, ages 7 and 11, passports, then worked through the red tape of obtaining visas to gain entrance into the country for a visit. I would go as soon as I could, just a few days after a leadership meeting at JGLM headquarters in Texas.

We left for Pakistan on April 20, 2014, and stayed for a month. I brought in an LED-powered video projector for the school, a PDF soft copy version of Blumenfeld's Alpha-Phonics program, 40 GB of DBI video files from Texas on a portable hard drive for Jamshaid, my two youngest children to lay hands, so they wouldn't think I was some kind of Benny Hinn, eight suitcases of clothing and personal supplies for us, and the Holy Spirit.

When we got there we found a very foreign place indeed. There were no westerners there; no westerner would want to go there. Everything was run down, with incomplete or abandoned construction projects everywhere. There was trash and the smell of open sewage everywhere. It was hot, 90-110 degrees F (35-45 degrees C) during the day. Hardly anyone spoke English. Traffic was awful. Garrett didn't like the spicy food. We could forget about any sense of food or water sanitation. During all my time there, apart from a couple of westerners at the airport, I saw one white man in the passenger seat of a car, with a Muslim driving him, and three black men at the McDonald's, which we went to after days of begging and nagging by my children to go there. This despite that I must have had my eyes on ten thousand people a day in the crowded city of Lahore, with a population of 5-6 million. My suspicions were confirmed: The western news media, Internet, and even the U.S. Department of State haven't a clue, because there are no western media or tourists there. No, there weren't Taliban roaming around with assault weapons looking for any white, Christian American that they could find to shoot at. There were some small Christian neighborhoods there, I saw people with "I love Jesus" written on their cars here and there, crosses hanging from their rear-view mirrors, crosses on the doors of their houses, plenty of outward show for someone to shoot at if someone was looking for a target.

Instead, we were held in high honor by Christians and Muslims alike, friends and strangers alike. These were a people who, at worst, were passers-by just about the business of living life and didn't give us a second look as they went about their business. But those we had actual contact with treated us as valued guests, with such hospitality, generosity, and grace that it made me quickly disgusted at typical American attitudes, including those in the western Christian culture.

There was obviously widespread poverty there, but I never saw starvation. The people did not complain. They made do with what they had and did the best they could.

The Christians there were genuine, eager to learn, and never argued with me. They had a simple faith, and were easy to teach, quick to accept the Word of God.

This short clip of a woman's prayer meeting captures that simplicity:

I call this guy the "singing pastor," because he always wanted to sing a song for us. He carries a Bible with him wherever he goes, though he is actually illiterate; he cannot read. Here he is singing in the car, with Jamshaid using a large plastic water jug as an improvised percussion instrument:

Here they are singing "Shuklria Yasu" ("Thank you Jesus") at a prayer meeting, and this at a brick kiln factory labor camp, of all places!

Here is a children's Sunday School class at the CSF primary school. Even the children were genuine and amazingly well behaved, especially in contrast to American standards.

Here is a video walk-through of the CSF primary school facility:

As you can see in the above video, they built a baptistry on the CSF school building grounds while we were there. We baptized about 40 people in water.

Here is the material and level that they were learning/teaching at the CSF primary school around the time I arrived:

(Click on any photographs to enlarge.) /

Well, every project has to start somewhere, and so did mine. I gathered the primary school teachers together and taught them Alpha-Phonics! There were two planned outcomes of this: First, they had no native English speaking person to impart to them proper English pronunciation, so I would need to do that. Second, by going through the Alpha-Phonics program with the teachers, they would learn how to go through it with their students.

Here is a video documenting what I did:

I worked with them roughly an hour a day, maybe four times a week (only when they were all available), and in four weeks we went through all 128 lessons, roughly 8 lessons a day.

While I was there, an adult education class was also started for the parents of the primary school children.

Here is a picture of them gathered, after we had left Pakistan, with the new adult school teacher (standing, upper left, dressed in orange with gold embellishments).

So this was just a beginning, helping to equip them for the long term work that they put their hands to. Hope for the future of these former brick kiln factory workers.

Jamshaid and his father, Javied, were humbling. They live as members of a lower-middle class family, pouring into these low-class, rural brick kiln families and garnering nothing in return, except the joy of seeing them being given hope for the future, and the gospel promoted in this Muslim nation. Meanwhile, by western standards, the Akhtars would be considered living at poverty level, and their house and neighborhood a slum, although they certainly would never view it that way themselves.

Here is a video walk-through showing the Akhtar's house and neighborhood:

18 year-old Jamshaid Akhtar, my translator, was also a strategic target. He was the only one of our hosts who spoke good English. I consider him the long-term "seed" (sort of reminiscent of Rochunga Pudaite of "Beyond the Next Mountain", with me a sort of "Watkin Roberts," and Jamshaid's father, Javied, a sort of "Chawnga"), who has now been successfully enrolled in JGLM's online DBI ("Dominion Bible Institute"), and has enthusiastically started the course work, with the help of local video files that I brought in on an external hard drive from JGLM headquarters in Texas, because of the Pakistan internet problem. With VLC Media Player, he is also able to slow the videos to make it more easily understandable.

We didn't go there to heal the sick. We went there to help out with the CSF primary school and encourage them. Healing the sick, casting out demons, and otherwise acting like a son of God is just what Christians do as they go, and that's what we did along the way. But we made quite an impact on them in doing so. It was an amazing time, despite many practical hardships of being in such a foreign place as that. We were there for the Kingdom of God, and it did not take very long to get a reputation. Going in the power of the Spirit, my boys and I consistently saw something like 90-95% instant, complete results in physical healings day by day. Hundreds of people were instantly healed, initially at the hands of myself and my two boys, then eventually at the hands of our Pakistani hosts, when they got a hold of the simplicity of the message. I lost count of all the tumors that melted and disappeared on the spot in a few minutes or seconds, all associated pain gone, including one breast tumor. Deaf ears were opened, many injured, half-paralyzed, or otherwise bedridden got up on their feet and walked around, pain-free, visually impaired were healed, kidney stones cured, all manner of pain gone, all the usual human afflictions and etc., with all sorts of follow-up testimonies.

In one memorable case, Javied had just begun to speak to 5-6 parents waiting to pick up their children about the opportunity to start the new adult education class. He lectured them about how they, too, should learn to read and write. One mother in particular kept saying that she did not have time for this, that she was too busy. I then asked for the opportunity to address them, with Jamshaid translating for me. I told them that the main reason that they should learn to read was to be able to read the Bible. I said that if they could not read the Bible, then men could lie to them about what God says. I said that if one man said that God says one thing, and another man said that he says something else, how would they know which man to believe? Then I said that, because I could read the Bible, I knew in Mark 16:18 that it says that believers will lay hands on sick people, and they will get well. I asked them if any of them were sick or had pain in their bodies. About three woman said that they did. I told my boys to take care of them, my boys laid hands on them, and they were healed. The last case was a woman who had a tumor in her leg. The tumor melted and went away on the spot. Then the woman who had been saying that she was too busy and did not have the time changed her mind and said that she would attend the adult education class.

My usual approach with any group was to start with 7 year-old Garrett laying hands and healing someone. This disarms the assumption that I was some special "gifted" individual, or that I did what I did because I was educated or some kind of scholar. Here's a short clip of Garrett laying hands on a man, our first Sunday at CSF. I think this was the first person that I called up at the end of the service. (Garrett is speaking very softly. He says, "In the name of Jesus, all pain go away.") Jamshaid's last words to the crowd are "chali gaye" ("gone now").

They never gave us a hard time. The strangers in public never said, "Not here, not now, in a public place." The Christians never said, "What about Paul's thorn in the flesh?" or "Maybe it's God's will for me to be sick."

While we were there, the CSF primary school office quickly became a drop-in center where villagers able to come, came to be healed. Then I felt like Jesus must have felt, walking the rural village streets with "my disciples," going from home to home where people requested healing. Word got around, and often they might only want us to pray a blessing over their families, homes, businesses, which also produced profound results, with humble businesses prospering the next day, people getting better jobs, or jobs returned if laid off, people asking for prayer for problems of arguing among family/relatives/children immediately saw peace and harmony, and so on. Meanwhile, our local hosts got a hold of all the simplicity of the message, and began to see like results; my goal was to wean them all completely off of me and my boys well before it was time for me to go home, particularly using my young boys as object lessons, so as to impart to them that they had this same authority as believers in Christ, if they would step out in faith and believe for themselves, like my 7 and 11 year-olds did. And they did!

On week 4 of 4, we went to visit some homes of sick people in the village on request, a typical daily routine. I told Javied, Jamshaid, and the CSF elder that they would be doing it now, not me. Jamshaid was in complete agreement, but Javied protested and argued with me for a while, saying that they would after I was gone, that these people were expecting me to lay hands on them, etc. I insisted and prevailed. The plan was that we would walk together into people's homes, and when the sick person requested prayer (in Punjabi), that rather than translate to English for me, one of them would just step forward and take care of it. It worked! Javied, Jamshaid, the elder/deacon, and his wife stepped forward and just did it, with the same instant results.

At one point, an interesting sequence of events happened. We visited a home with an old woman crippled and in pain by arthritis, and was thin/starving because she couldn't hold food down. She looked pretty bad, so Jamshaid shot a sheepish smile at me, shook his head, and said that I must deal with this. So I took over, dealt with the woman, got her out of pain, up out of bed, walked her around a little bit, then commanded the stomach to work, and directed them to get her some food, which the lady of the house said would need to be bought or prepared.

We have photographs of this. Here's the old woman crippled with arthritis that Jamshaid didn't want to deal with:

As we left there, I began rebuking Jamshaid, explaining that he was in doubt and unbelief, etc., that it is not big devils and little devils, or else it would be big God and little God, little God who can only deal with minor illnesses. I said that all afflictions are paid for, that he should treat all sickness the same, etc. Sure enough, the next house we visited had a man on a bed, half-paralyzed (left side), probably from a stroke. I shot a look at Jamshaid with raised eyebrows and motioned to him to take care of it. He went after it, spoke to the paralysis, commanded in English, then this thing and that in Punjabi, I saw the man open and close his left hand (which he could not do before), then Jamshaid got the man up and walked him around. He was completely cured and walked around without assistance. Here's Jamshaid with the half-paralyzed man:

In another memorable example, I had just finished lecturing a new adult education class that CSF was starting up for parents of the CSF primary school children. I had urged them about the importance of learning to read and write, so that they could read the Bible, help their children with their school work, read public documents, and so on.

Then Javied lectured them on the importance of regular attendance, promptness, and diligence to their studies:

After that, we just went back into the CSF office. Nobody said anything about healing the sick.

But as I mentioned before, the CSF office had become a sort of healing center for people to drop in and be healed of their afflictions, or to ask that we visit someone in the village. So when the parents' meeting was over, a whole bunch of them lined up in the office to be healed of things. When I was informed of the first one, a lady, I motioned with my hand to the wife of the CSF deacon/elder who was there. She promptly walked over to the woman, put her hands on her, said a bunch of things in Punjabi, and the woman was healed. One after another, Javied, Jamshaid, the CSF deacon/elder, and his wife just naturally took turns healing them all. It was awesome. I did nothing. Only once my 7 year-old Garrett was asked to lay hands on a woman with a knee problem (see center picture, below), which of course was instantly healed, but other than that, we just sat and watched, with me asking for translation into English each time to find out what was going on.

Here are photographs of that scene in the CSF school office: (Click on any picture to enlarge it.)

Does it get any better than this? Read on.

Later on in the day, I was invited to speak at a prayer meeting in a home in the city. With 4 days to go here in Pakistan, I was determined not to lay hands on anyone myself. As I was sitting there waiting to speak to the group, the message came clearly: The little Pakistani girls here shall heal the sick in this meeting. (Note the woman in the yellow outfit in the back. She is a Muslim. I'll talk about her later.)

I spoke on the believer's authority, our dominion in Christ over the devil and his works, and so on, as usual. At the end of the message, I spoke, as usual, about how I was nothing special on account of being an American, educated, etc., and that even a child who believes can do this, and I would prove it.

I called up an older man, who turned out to have knee pain and problems for many years, then called up my 7 year-old Garrett, who put his hands on the man's knees.

The man was instantly healed and walked around without any pain in front of everyone.

Then I said I would do something surprising. I called for another sick person to come up, then I asked for one of the Pakistani girls who were sitting up front on the floor, who was a believer and not shy, and wanted to heal the sick, to come up. I told her that if she believed that Jesus healed the sick, then she could too, because she had Jesus living in her. I had instructed them all not to "pray to God" and etc., since God had nothing to do with the sickness, but to tell the sickness to go, using "police officer" illustrations. But this girl put her hands on the woman in pain and stood there for a while "praying to God" about it. I asked if the woman was better, and she said only a little. Then Javied stepped in and insistantly told the girl in Punjabi that she must say a short command and tell the pain to go. The girl repeated as instructed, and the woman was completely freed from her pain.

At this point, I called one Pakistani child after another up, and all the sick adults were healed, except for one almost-blind man with diabetes and kidney problems on dialysis, who had been at another meeting a few days before, and had improved a little bit since then.

The climax was a Muslim woman who was attending the prayer meeting out of curiosity. She wanted prayer for her son and son-in-law, who were in jail. But we also found out that she was in pain in her body. I then announced to everyone that this woman was a Muslim, and that I would now prove to them that Jesus paid for all sins and afflictions of Muslims and everyone else, that it wouldn't matter that she was a Muslim (in terms of her being healed of her afflictions). At this point, Javied stepped in and said, "I will pray for this one." He did, and she was instantly healed of her pain. I then put my hand on her shoulder and spoke words of faith over her situation with her sons. She had tears in her eyes (which is significant, because in this culture they do not have the outward shows of emotion common among westerners).

I pulled this stunt again the last Sunday I was there back at the CSF facility, the day before we left for home:

Here are video clips of me, preaching on Sunday May 11, and water baptisms:

Here are video clips of me, preaching the last Sunday, May 18, and more water baptisms:

There were a couple of Muslim converts among those baptized in water.

Five days after I returned to the U.S., I spoke with Jamshaid for the first time via Skype. He said that he had just led a youth group meeting, and at the end of the meeting asked for any sick people to come up to be healed, as I had in all my meetings there. Several people came up with various things, and they were all instantly healed. This included a woman who had fallen and broken her elbow. First he commanded the pain to go, and it did, but she could still not move the elbow. Then he commanded it three or four times again, each time it got better, and in the end she had full mobility of her arm; the bone was completely healed.

Then he shared another testimony. Various people had come into the CSF school office seeking healing. They would looked around and ask, "Where is the white man?" Jamshaid and Javied would say, "Do not look for the white man. He is not here anymore. He has gone back to America, and will come again according to the timing of the Lord God. He showed us that we all have the same authority as he did, so you should not look for him." Then they, or the elder, or his wife, or one of the CSF school teachers would lay hands on them and they would be healed. They would also bless families, jobs, and businesses as I did, with results. The whole experience was like chapters out of a missionary biography story book. Things just got better and better during our time there, and they continued after we had left, including healings and miracles, and other blessings.

The next project would be a vocational training program at the CSF facility. Here women are being trained using sewing machines. The students who are diligent and committed to the program will be able to keep the sewing machines they are using, after a year in the program. Then they will be able to earn money for their families using their new skills and the sewing machines. (Javied is a tailor by profession, so he is well qualified to lead this effort.)

It was all just the beginning.

Healings and miracles continued at CSF in Pakistan. They taught healing to the school children. Here are some videos, with Javied's words:

"she is CSF school teacher she had sever pain in her teeth . after pray she feeling better and now she dont have pain in her teeth"

"CSF school student had pain in her right leg , and teacher said to one school children pray for her leg. after pray her pain has gone in Jesus name praise God"

"this woman have her baby boy he had fever and woman had pain in her arm so praise God after pray fever has gon and arm pain has also gone praise God"

"CSF school teacher had high blood pressier and pain in her joint after pray she got healing in Jesus name"

This woman had hepatitis C, Javied prayed over her, she was healed, felt immediately better, and now feels fine. Her blood test report is now very good.

Closed captions in English are available on most devices (not Apple iOS, unless version 7.0 or later and enabled in accessibility settings). Here is the text:

Woman: "I am thankful to God. On Thursday, Servant of God (Pastor Javied) visited me and I was so sick. And he prayed for me. And God healed me right away. I am thankful to God that He sent his two servants (one pastor Javied and his friend) and they prayed for me. I am thankful to God that now I am all the way better now. On Sunday I also share my testimony to all of you that God showed me His glory. And I was healed from hepatitis C. " Javied: "Which sickness was that?" Woman: "Hepatitis C." Javied: "Thank you."