Spirit Daily

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Sister Caught In Tsunami Prayed In Spirit And Found An Awesome God In The Chaos

We continue to be interested in the great Asian tsunami and its spiritual aspects. In one e-mail, a woman in Phuket, Malayasia, related her "miraculous escape" as she prayed in tongues.

An update: new research indicates that in at least one place, the wave rose to a height of 90 feet. It was so powerful that it unearthed an ancient Indian port city.

But back to those sisters, Chung Eng Lee, 33, and June, 42, who were standing in their hotel lobby when they looked outside to see a huge wave that blotted out the sun and crashed into the glass panes in front of them.

The two were immediately engulfed in rising water and clung to a hotel pillar as they prayed. In her testimony, Chung Eng Lee recalls that moment in her own words under the headline, "Jesus Saved Our Life --Testimony."

"It is definitely a blessing from the Lord that I could still write this e-mail and wish you a Happy New Year," she said. "Ever since The Malayasian Daily Sun newspaper carried the news of our survival, I have been getting calls and e-mails wishing for my speedy recovery. I have to admit that I have not been responding to any calls as I was/am still recovering [this written 13 days after the December 26 event]."

The whole experience was shocking, she said, "but if anything good has come out of it, it is that my personal faith, walking with the Lord, has definitely soared higher. You will hear me mentioning about Jesus and how miraculously He saved me and my sister," she proclaimed.

And how did that happen?

According to Lee, the night before the incident,  she had a sudden urge to sing a Christian worship song. This of course was Christmas. But she saw the prompting as a "preparation."

The chorus of the song has these words: When the oceans rise and thunder roars/ I will soar with You above the storm/ Father You are King over the Flood/ I will be still knowing You are God.

Then came December 26, about six a.m.

"We were supposed to check out from one hotel and check into another," she recalled. "There was no reason for us to wake up so early since it was our much deserved holiday, but on that 26th Dec 6.00 a.m. (both my sis and I which were sleeping on separate beds) we felt as though someone was waking us up. I thought my sis woke me up to pray as she normally would but I thought, 'can't be' as it was still so early. Little did I know, she felt it too and she had the same thought. I then opened my eyes and looked at her and realized that it was not our own doing. We were not scared, and concluded that the Lord wanted us to wake up to pray. So we did just that."

And they ended up checking out.

But soon as they checked into the other hotel, around 9:45 a.m., they spotted people running frantically. "I saw a huge big 30-foot high wave come crushing through the glass door of the reception area. It was so scary as the height of the wave covered the blue sky, the whole area darkened. We were inside the reception area; there was no way to run as the wave crashed mercilessly towards the glass door. We could hear loud noises from the shattered glass and in a split second the reception area was filled with the seawater. The water rose to our necks and we were swept against another glass door, the glass door shattered and threw us out of the reception area. We both were clinging on each other. The water swept over us and we went under the water."

Continued Lee: "My mind went blank; I gulped some sea water -- that was all I could remember. Somehow, somewhere in the middle of it, as everything happened so fast, we managed to cling on a wooden pillar. At that precise moment, all we could do was to just pray. I left everything on earth at that point of time, my family, my love ones, my business, my friends, everything... There was nothing I could cry to except to God and I did just that."

Heeding the words of a pastor, Lee said, " I remembered that he always told us to pray in tongues even more when are in trouble. That was the only knowledge that I have and could use then."

They were frantically peering about and trying to comprehend the disaster. It was chaos. Gas tanks were leaking. Roofs were tumbling. Cars were crashing through the building! And there were dead bodies everywhere.

"All I did was pray," wrote Lee. "Pray and pray and all I knew was to hold my sister tightly so that we would not be separated."

About seven minutes later, an even stronger wave came.

Again they were swept up.

Again they prayed. That gave her Lee presence of mind not to panic, and to stop others nearby from panicking.

In the midst of the crisis, in calming down a woman nearby, they brought that woman to Jesus. As all three prayed, the prayers were that much more powerful. As they swam, as they clung to the stairs, to poles, they urged others to pray to Jesus! "My sister prayed in Jesus' Name to break and bind all the fear in them," notes Lee in her remarkable testimony.

Instead of crying, instead of screaming, there was a calm as they prayed in tongues. And they began to sing that song about the ocean rising. "The sudden feeling of God's Presence and His greatest love just flowed in my heart and immediately I had peace and fear left me," says Lee. She felt the Lord telling her, "Don't worry, everything is going to be over and the wave will not come near you."

Which it didn't. There was no third wave -- not there, not at that hotel.

The water subsided and the sea turned to it lucent blue on that otherwise calm day. Says Lee: "He is truly an awesome God and He is alive and His Word is alive."

Feb 18 2005

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