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About The Episode:

Have you ever stood on the edge, your feet teetering over the abyss of the unknown, and wondered what it would take to walk on water? Our latest podcast sweeps you into the heart of such transformative moments, drawing upon Peter’s water-walking experience to offer insights into the essence of true faith. We peel back the layers of this biblical event to understand just how critical our focus on Jesus is, especially when the storms of life rage around us. We explore the implications of shifting our sight away from Him and the dangers of complacency when faced with longstanding challenges.

The episode further wades into the deeply moving account of Peter, John, and a lame man at the temple gates. Reflect with us on the life-altering potential that lies within the embrace of a nurturing community and the steadfast commitment to spiritual disciplines. The discussion brings to light the power of our surroundings and the people we choose to journey alongside, inspiring you to examine your own circles and the type of spiritual sustenance they offer. Discover the profound impact these relationships can have on your path towards spiritual growth, much like the transformative encounter at the Beautiful Gate.

We also turn to the remarkable narrative of obedient faith catalyzing the healing of a man unable to walk. We traverse the importance of acting in faith, despite uncertainties or lack of experience, and the miraculous outcomes that await on the other side of obedience. Witness the strength that surfaces in our moments of weakness and how divine timing orchestrates events beyond our wildest imaginations. This dialogue is an invitation to trust deeply in God’s masterful plan, to step out in faith with the anticipation of wonders, and leap into a life of praise and purpose.

Where to dive in:

(0:00:00) – Fixing Your Gaze on Jesus

Maintaining focus on Jesus through difficulties, dangers of accepting issues as unchangeable, and being spiritually prepared.

(0:12:17) – Power of Faith and Community

Maintaining spiritual practices and choosing supportive relationships can lead to blessings, as seen in Peter and John’s encounter with the lame man.

(0:20:51) – The Power of Prayer and Focus

Prayer is powerful and should be our first action, shifting focus from problems to seeking divine intervention.

(0:25:45) – Expectation and Unanswered Prayers

Expectation in faith, prayer, divine intervention, desires vs. God’s plans, body ministry, Paul’s revelations, strength in weakness.

(0:39:00) – Miracles Happen Through Obedient Faith

Faith and obedience can lead to miraculous changes, as seen in Peter’s healing of a man unable to walk.

About your host:

Jaime Luce’ testimony has daunting personal mountains and treacherous financial valleys. She was trapped in day-to-day stress and couldn’t see a way forward. But how she started is not how she finished! And she wants you to know God has a plan for your life too, no matter how tough it seems. Today, Jaime has been married to the love of her life for almost three decades, owns two companies, and has become an author and podcaster. God’s way is always the blessed way! 

Free chapter of Jaime’s new book: You Don’t Need Money, You Just Need God: https://jaimeluce.com/book/

Connect with Jaime: 

Website: https://jaimeluce.com

Facebook:  / jaime.luces.page  

Instagram:  / jaime_luce  

LinkedIn:  / jaime-luce-00395691  

Full Transcript

This transcript is auto-generated and not perfect. We hope it blesses you.

Speaker separation errors can arise when multiple speakers speak simultaneously.

0:00:00 – Peter Drummond
the first thing that you need to have happen is your perspective needs to shift and see things from his perspective, because it is not impossible with God. Nothing is impossible with God and if we can realize that over our situation, we’re going to see his plan of hope. Like my pastor always says, any plan or any situation that you see throughout the lens of hope does not yet have the heavenly perspective. So we need to come up to the third heaven worship, pray, intercede, win the battle in the spirit and then it will manifest in the physical.

0:00:40 – Jaime Luce
Welcome to the Jamie Luce Podcast. I’m so happy that you have tuned in. Today. I have a very special treat for you.

We will be speaking with Peter Drummond from the Light a Candle Foundation, and it’s a. They do many things so I can’t really put them in a box, but they are, in essence, missionaries of all different types short-term, long-term. They do child sponsorship. They go into the places that are unreachable and doing not just feeding and not just medical care, but training and teaching people the word of God to truly bring them the light in the gospel of Jesus Christ. So I’m really excited about this today.

I know you’re going to be looking forward to hearing what he has to say and maybe opening your eyes to some things that are going on that you may not be aware of. I know our news lets us see what they want us to see, but we need to know what’s really happening out there, and so let me tell you a little bit about Peter before we have him start. Peter is a multi-talented creative with a passion for beauty, excellence and a desire to be a voice for the voiceless. He was classically trained from the age of five. I love piano and loves to play piano to relax. Peter’s musical side is complemented by his love for strategy and business. His passion is to see people grow in their relationship with God and to walk in obedience to his call on their life. He also has a major case of the travel bug I don’t blame him and has a dream to visit every country on the planet. So with that I welcome Peter Drummond.

0:02:17 – Peter Drummond
Hi, peter, thank you so much, hi, jamie. Yeah, I do have a massive case of the travel bug. One of my mentors and people I look up to is Lauren Cunningham and he, you know, obviously was the founder of YWAM, and I have a similar dream to him to go to every nation on the planet.

0:02:35 – Jaime Luce
That’s fantastic. Yes, I’m familiar with that organization. We actually, on a personal note, I have some friends whose daughter was involved with their organization, and so we housed several missionary girls for a while on their travels through all the places. They’d come from base camp and then they were raising funds and doing different things. So that’s a great organization as well, wonderful. Well, why don’t you give us, peter, kind of your synopsis of who is Light a Candle and why do we need to be aware of who you are and what you’re doing?

0:03:11 – Peter Drummond
Absolutely so. I’m sure a lot of your listeners have heard of Sean Foyt. He did a lot around America, particularly during COVID with Let Us Worship. You might have heard of Hold the Line us worship. You might have heard of Hold the Line, but he also, back in the day, started Burn 24-7, which is a 24,. You know it’s a movement to pray and intercede over your city. It’s called the Burn and so it focuses on worship, intercession, all of that.

And they started going well, if God is moving in our city because we’re praying and worshiping over it, what if he could move in other cities? And it’s like, well, of course he will. And so they started doing missions trips and all of a sudden there were so many people who wanted to go and share about Jesus and to, like Jehoshaphat, send out the worshipers in front. You know, like, who do we send? We send the worshipers first. And so you know who do we send? We send the worshipers first. And so, you know, they started doing missions trips. And eventually it just, uh, when isis was coming towards, uh, you know, the, the main city in northern iraq, a lot of the missions organizations, they were pulling their people out because they’re like it’s dangerous. It’s dangerous, you know, and sean went right let’s send the worshipers. And so light of candle was birthed, one one out of just the ever-growing amount of missions, trips and different missions, endeavors that were running through the burn.

But in 2016, we sent over three young, like 20s, blonde girls to the Middle East, and all of them were, in one way, shape or form, former babysitters of the Foyt kids. But they asked they put the word out who’s going to go? Who will say yes, who’s going to be obedient to the Lord? And these three girls just went. We’ll do it. And you know, obviously the team grew from there, but they were obedient. They stepped out in faith and that’s how Light a Candle was birthed was simple obedience and it was going. Let’s run towards the harvest.

You know, there’s so many places around the world that have unreached people groups, and there’s so many places around the world that people think are dangerous or hard to go to, but they’re not if you’re acting in obedience to the Lord. And so they were able to get that perspective shift. See from his perspective what he wanted to do, and they said, yes, we want to be a part of that. So that’s kind of how Light a Candle got started, and so we’ve had a team in the Middle East since 2016, 2017.

And in 2018, we started a child sponsorship program in India for trafficked kids kids who were, you know, either in or you know, going to be sold into child labor different things like that and to date, we’ve been able to rescue about 1350 kids out of that into the fullness and the reality of the kingdom of God.

So we do a lot in India as well, and we also run about, you know, 15 to 20 missions trips a year and the goal is to activate people from wherever it is that they live, into the nation so that they can see that God is alive today, that he loves people, that he has a plan and that he is moving on the earth.

And so, between all of those different things that we do, it kind of unites around this thing of you know it is better to light a candle than curse the darkness. You know you get a lot of keyboard warriors out there like, oh, this is terrible, this is like none of that. You know no one’s going to change their opinion because you commented on a post. What they’re going to do is, if they change their opinion is if their heart gets hit. And so our goal is to activate people to reach their neighbor Absolutely, because Jesus talks about that, but also to go to the farthest parts of the earth and impact and reach people there. And you can do that from sitting in your living room, where you are right now. You know you can do it by coming on a trip. There’s so many ways that you can actually be active in the Great Commission, and so that’s kind of our main goal is to just activate people into that.

0:07:14 – Jaime Luce
That’s great. I love what you said about the girls having the right. What we need to have a mind shift, and I actually talked about this recently on a podcast because if we look at something as impossible, inherently what we’re saying is that Jesus is not able, that we’re actually saying I don’t believe he can do the impossible, I don’t actually believe. And we have to confront believe and we have to confront the thoughts and intentions in our heart to recognize, you know, I say I’m a Christian or I say I care about these things and I say that God will make a way. But when we hesitate and don’t obey whatever that call is, whatever that instruction is, whatever that call is, whatever that instruction is, he says that you love me if you actually obey me. In Acts, I believe it is I’m between chapters three and six. Somewhere in there one of the verses says that he gives the Holy Spirit to those who obey and it’s like so those who will do you will have that power come. You’ll have those open doors made before you, but not till you step out because you believe he actually will. I mean we wouldn’t have the story of the Jericho walls coming down if they didn’t actually go do the thing that God told them to do in the face of impossibility, you know, and. And that the fact that they run you’re if they’re being first responders, you’re running into the emergency. You know it’s King David as a boy running in to face the giant instead of cowering in fear and saying, look, what’s going to happen to us. So I love that.

I think that the heart behind it based off of what I’ve been able to see just through social media and whatnot, seeing that, whether it’s through worship or the different missions, things that have gone on, it’s definitely going at a time when people say don’t go, you know, don’t do, you can’t. You know and the opposition comes no-transcript that you guys are really doing what scripture says. You’re actually living it. So I commend you and all those who are willing to do that. I’m sure there are those listening who are thinking to themselves I’ve always wanted to go, do something like that. I just don’t know how and by the end of this conversation, my hope is that they will have a contact to know who to call and be able to put some feet to their faith and be able to do those things. Maybe you could take a minute and share with us some of the things that are happening right now, where some teams are and what you’re actually doing right now.

0:10:30 – Peter Drummond
Absolutely yeah. So as we speak, we have a team in northern Iraq right now and they’ve been able to go around and visit a number of people in their houses. They’ve seen so many people healed. They’ve seen people come to know Jesus, you know, right in their homes. And we always try and do that. We always try and go and visit people. You know Jesus says when you go to a house, you know you give your peace to that house. If it’s received, then you go in and you have food with them, you know. And then, if it’s not, you let your peace return to you and you leave.

That’s very, very cultural for the middle east and a lot of the things you know. When it says and the disciples broke bread and ate. When you go to the middle east, that’s just how you eat. It’s. It’s not something profound about breaking bread. That’s how you eat. You break the bread in half and you hand it to the person next to you so that they can take the bread and they can eat. You know. So it’s very common, for when you go to someone’s house, you would be invited in, you know, and they would feed you, they’d ask you to stay the night, you know.

You know in the West we’re very much like. Yes, come for afternoon tea at four o’clock.

0:11:37 – Jaime Luce
Yes.

0:11:38 – Peter Drummond
The Middle East is very much like you can’t stay until tomorrow, you, and so our team is right now. They’re over there, um, and they’re, you know, going and visiting people in their homes, blessing them, you know, and I’m sure that there’s gonna be more testimonies to come out, but we’ve already heard, like I said, of so many people getting healed, all of that kind of stuff, so there’s wonderful fruit there. Um, we have a team right now who’s in india as well. Uh, they’re out in the villages right now in the most, some of the most remote villages that just exist. When I was there a couple months ago, me and my sponsorship coordinator, hannah, we were out there and they were saying hey, just so you guys know, you’re the first organization in 40 years to come to this village.

The government has forgotten about it. Other organizations don’t want to come here because it’s too far to go. You guys are the first people to come here in 40 years. Like I’m not 40 years old, so in my lifetime no one has gone to that village to help. And the people come up to us and they’re like why do you care for my kids? Like no one else does. And I get to say well, because my God told me to do this. And they’re. Who’s your God? You know, india has 320 million gods, one for every American right.

0:12:54 – Jaime Luce
Right.

0:12:56 – Peter Drummond
You know what I mean.

Yes, but, they have so many, they’ll worship anything. And Indians are extraordinary worshipers. They are the best worshipers on earth. Like, god built that nation to worship him, and that’s one of the reasons why the sponsorship program is so important is because we still see that as India’s destiny is that there’ll be a nation that worships Jesus.

And so, you know, we go out to these villages. No one’s been there in 40 years. We go out there. All of a sudden the people are like, hey, why do you care for my kid? And we tell them about God.

And I remember the first time that we ever went out to the villages, we would go to these churches, you know, and we provide a simple message about the gospel. And you know we would say who wants to receive Jesus? You know, 40 hands go up and we pray for the filling of the Holy Spirit and all of a sudden we start praying for healing. 40, 50 people get healed. And I’ll never forget there was this one lady. I called out a word, knowledge for sore gums and we prayed. She got healed instantly and, very counter to the culture, ran from the back of the church to the front and locked her arms around me, crying, and she said you don’t understand. For 26 years, I’ve had constant pain in my mouth, constant headaches, migraines. Right now, it’s the first time in my memory that I don’t have pain. I feel like a new woman. I don’t understand what’s happening. Who is this Jesus? So, even though we’ve got teams there right now, there’s this history of God moving when you go to these remote places because he wants to impact those people.

0:14:28 – Jaime Luce
You know I don’t remember if it was you or when I spoke to one of the other people there in your organization, but I was told that to get to these places that it can actually take your team members up to two weeks just to reach them with supplies. I mean that the the journey to the village is by itself two weeks, you know yeah, that that’s almost correct.

0:14:54 – Peter Drummond
It takes us two, two weeks just to get the food every month to the kids. So half of the year is spent getting these kids food. So our team lives two weeks on the road getting the food out to these remote villages and I mean remote. I’ve been to over 60 of our villages and they are so far out there you can’t even comprehend. It’s off the end of the road, you know.

You have to ask in one village how to get to the next village. Then you ask there how to get to the other one. Then you drive off the end of the dirt track onto just two lanes with grass everywhere and fields. You keep driving and then you finally get to the villages that we work in. But the reason we went there is because no one else is willing to go.

And we said Jesus still calls these children worthy. He still has a plan and a future for their life. You know, and my hope is that you know, when you hear about the places that we’re going, that you’re stirred in your own heart, that Holy Spirit would be speaking to you, to your listeners. You know to me, and saying here’s what I want you to do. You know like there are so many chances to reach out to people around us. And, yeah, it does take us a long time to get where we’re going.

0:16:07 – Jaime Luce
Yeah, and you know, what’s amazing too is for them to see that kind of consistency. It’s one thing to have someone one time and that’s a blessing to receive help one time, but to continually go back, but to continually go back. Maybe you can tell the listeners how it’s set up, that you have local pastors. You train up the local pastors. They then care for because so many organizations and they’re good organizations they feed people, they clothe people, they make sure that they’ve got clean water. But this is what I’ve heard.

It’s also been a concern of mine. I don’t want to just take care of someone’s physical body and yet they never are taught truly about Jesus. So their soul, this is not going to do them any good. I mean, you’re temporarily easing pain, but this isn’t going to do them eternally any good and that we want to make sure that we train them and teach them truly the gospel, and so that their lives are not just changed in the physical sense, but that their hearts, their souls, for the life that they’re living, where they’re living, what they’re dealing with, is changed and they’ve got joy that they’re able to deal with the circumstances they’re in as well as then have the promise of what’s to come, so maybe you can share some of that.

0:17:34 – Peter Drummond
Yeah, I mean we’ll look at Jesus’ example. Right, he didn’t just meet physical needs, he met spiritual needs as well. When you read the gospel, jesus always did three things. I’ve read the New Testament all in one big chunk one time and I would look at what was special about each book. And I noticed that when I read the gospels, jesus always did things. He explained what the kingdom of heaven was like, he demonstrated it and then he gave an opportunity for you to join, and so that’s what we try and emulate with sponsorship is his father’s heart.

So, yes, the food is important, because hungry people aren’t really in a listening mood right then, once you I mean think about it, you know you go to lunch with a friend you’re like, could this way to please come back? So you know we, we do. Food is such an important thing. You know that these kids, they’re all severely, severely malnourished, to the point that their skin doesn’t even have enough nutrients to fully color. You know you’ll notice kids with white patches on their hair, on their skin. You know it’s from malnutrition. So the food is important but, like you said, what good is? You know everything in the world if you don’t go to heaven, and so you know, we have the physical care, we have the spiritual care as well and the emotional care, because we do.

In all the villages we work in it’s nearly 90 now we have village pastors that we have had relationship through our team for, sometimes up to 25, 30 years with these pastors. We’ve known them, we know who they are, we know that they preach the word, we know that they’re solid. We know that they’re solid, we know that they’re not gonna, you know, do anything silly, um, you know none of the money goes to these pastors. You know we buy the supplies and bring it out. That’s why it takes so long, um, but it means that there’s accountability, you know right. And so you know we go out and we bring, you know, all of this food.

But then, like I said, people start asking why do you care for my kids? And so I mean the kids have Sunday school. You know we like to do a lot of things that we can’t even talk about, but a lot of the things that would get us shut down in India are the things that we’re the most excited about, you know, and our country, one of our country directors we have two he said to me Peter, india will be changed in a generation if we raise these kids up to know Jesus. He said look in 15 and 20 years, look in 30 years, you’ll see India is completely different to today. And everyone goes oh, how is that possible? Look at countries like Saudi Arabia. Look at countries like Iran. You know, one of the largest underground and fastest growing churches in the world is in Iran and it’s led by women who, culturally, are the lowest in society, right? So you look at a country like Iran, you say nothing good could ever happen there, nothing good could ever come out of Nazareth. Well, you need the perspective shift. You need to see what God is doing.

And we look at these kids as the future catalysts of change in the entire nation of India and we’re raising them that way. We’re not raising little kids to just be like oh yeah, I want to go to high school. They’re going to go to high school. All right, they’re also going to go on and become doctors, lawyers, nurses, teachers, mothers, raising their kids up in the exact same way. You know and Sean has, like, prophesied this that one of our kids is going to become the president or the prime minister of India. You know, like we see that we try and see these kids as kings and queens and we try and treat them that way. You know, we raise them to know the word we raise them to. You know, live in hope, you know to do all of these things, and so, like it’s, it’s, it can’t be one or the other, it has to be both, right.

0:21:05 – Jaime Luce
Right, absolutely. I mean they don’t care and don’t really know that you care or that this is important until you do meet their needs. We know that, meeting their needs and knowing you’re consistent, yes, exactly.

0:21:22 – Peter Drummond
Like my sponsorship coordinator always says, kids need to know that they’re loved. You need to be telling them who they are and they also need consistency to be right For them to get raised knowing geez. We need to be consistent and when that truck shows up every single month, they feel loved. There’s even sometimes, every single month, we have people crying because they know that we’re coming back and we were one of the only people driving out to these villages during COVID.

I have sat with and I’ll be conservative here 40 families who families who I’ve sat in their house with them drinking their tea, and they’ve looked me straight in the eye and they said, peter, we owe you our life because Light a Candle was the only one to come out to our village during COVID. Without you, we would not be alive right now. Without you, my family would all have starved to death and there is millions across India who experienced that Because they lived in a remote village and they live day to day that you know. Hundreds and thousands of them died from starvation because they couldn’t get into the cities and Light a Candle made sure that that wasn’t true for any family. That’s in our program.

0:22:29 – Jaime Luce
Wow, then I mean, obviously the goal is to continue to, to grow and reach more villages and to be able to um handle that growth because of is. Are the funds that you receive through sponsorship? Is it through just offerings? How? Sponsorship Is it through just offerings? How is?

0:22:53 – Peter Drummond
the organization sustained. Yeah yeah, so a little bit of business speak. Every part of the organization kind of, you know, sustains itself through the programs that it runs. But for sponsorship, specifically, it’s $49 a month, you know, and out of that lighter candle only keeps about four dollars, fifty five dollars, um, the reason I say that is some sponsors are on our uh, our old price and some sponsors are on the, the price that’s practical for the future.

You know, with inflation, everything rising costs in india, um, but what’s important is the fact that we give the same amount of care that we did before, even though the cost of it, you know, materials in india has gone, you know, maybe two or three times per item. We’ve just been very clever and resourceful and the Lord has really led us, but you know it does get sustained through that. So I think it’s $30 out of you know, the 45, 49 goes just to food and then we save up other parts of the. You know the breakdown. So we’ve got education supplies. They’d see, see a doctor twice a year, which is more than I see a doctor, but at least I could if I wanted to. Right, right, right, you know, but they need it because they’re malnourished. They’ve got all these, you know, like those sicknesses that they need to see a doctor for, and they can never afford it, not in a million years right and so they see a doctor twice a year, receive medication.

You know, once a year we hand out educational supplies for their entire school year. They go home with this fat stack of textbooks and all the stuff that they couldn’t afford. You know, we hand that out to them and so many other things like just small incidentals. For example, a lot of them had to when they went home. There’s no power in their village. The whole village doesn’t have electricity, so once the sun goes down they can’t study. But we bought them solar rechargeable lamps so that they could recharge the lamp all day with having it sit outside and then at night time they could do their homework. We also bought them school desks so that they would have the dignity to not have to lean over forwards and write on the concrete, but they’d be able to actually sit at a desk with some dignity and do their schoolwork. And our country director said bro, I grew up having to lean over and write on the ground. He said I had so many back problems from that. So it’s even small things like the school desks, like lamps. We’ve got the umbrellas so they don’t get wet. We buy them school bags so they can keep their stuff together water bottles, lunch boxes, like the whole just stuff that kids need, and so we meet all of those needs and a lot of those do get met through donors.

We needed a new truck to be able to get out to the villages. We need another one. Right now it’s $20,000, $22,000. And we had a donor call up and they said the Lord’s been speaking to me, I want to buy you guys a truck. They bought us a truck and it’s fed every single one of our kids for the last year and a little bit.

So there’s a lot of things that happen. Mostly it’s private donations, but sponsorship also covers quite a lot of things that happen. Mostly it’s private donations, but sponsorship also covers quite a lot of it. And the important thing with sponsorship about Light a Candle is that family is so important. We don’t actually have orphanages. I think there’s only two or three orphanages that we even work with in the entire program. We want these kids to stay with their parents. Often only one of the parents is still alive, usually the mother, because the father’s worked himself to death or, you know, the mother might have died in childbirth, so it’s only the father left. You know, think back like a couple hundred years to problems like that. That’s the reality, the present day reality, in a lot of these villages, and so we actually encourage the families to stay together.

We bring the food out to the village, we bring the educational suppliers out to the village, we bring the doctors out to the villages yeah because we want these people, these kids, to live with, whichever parent is still alive, you know, because that’s really good family is so important and by pulling into an orphanage, that doesn’t help with that and it also isn’t even practical for a lot of kids.

0:26:55 – Jaime Luce
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You can find my book on Amazon. You can also go to jamielucecom. You can also find this book at youdon’tneedmoneyyoujustneed need godcom. This book is available today. Oh, that’s good to know. I mean, I didn’t know that. That’s really good it, because it makes it that you’ve changed their life personally, not just corporately you know, it.

It’s me individually, the way I live at my house with my family and with child trafficking being what it is. You want a secure family. You want to know that there’s food. I’ve heard horror stories of how parents have sold their children some aware, some not aware what they’re doing in order to receive funds, thinking they’re going to take care of their families and I’m sure I’m.

0:28:33 – Peter Drummond
Yeah, I’m sure you’ve run into some pretty pretty sensitive, scary things I mean we work in two of the three like top uh child trafficking sourcing locations in india. So in english it’s the two out of the top three places that traffickers go to buy kids, the places that we work, and the main reason that children are sold is because the parents can’t afford to feed them and so when we bring the food it immediately almost eliminates the risk of trafficking because the the, the, the need isn’t there. There’s also a lot of forced servitude. You know bonded labor You’ll hear about. You know stories about kids having to work in someone else’s house, you know, like, as cleaners or you know doing different things, and of course that is not a safe environment for a young girl to be in because there is a chance that you know they could be abused there. And routinely in remote villages like that they are.

You know there’s a bunch of girls in our program who are all rescued temple prostitutes.

They’re either rescued before they were, you know, dedicated or in a couple of cases they were, you know, actually rescued right out of the temple and they get dedicated as soon as they get their first period.

So the second that they know that you’re ready, they will dedicate you and it’s seen as an honor to the gods which, if you can imagine that selling your child to be raped thousands and thousands of times is considered a blessing for the family, and we say not the daughters of god. You know these children are not for sale. You know, that’s right. We’re, we’re gonna bring them out of that into the fullness of the kingdom, and we have, you know, um, we have a safe house with, you know, a certain number of girls at it and a couple of boys as well, because you know the mothers will come and they’ll make the ultimate sacrifice. They will have heard that we can help. They’ll drop their daughter off and then they’ll go back to the city that they lived in and they’ll make the commitment to not see their child again, or at least not for many, many years, so that that child doesn’t get sold into the same life that they were.

0:30:53 – Jaime Luce
That makes me think of the story of Solomon, you know, where his mother, hannah’s, crying out for a child. She finally gets the child, but the promise was okay, but I’m going to give him back to you to take care of him, and he’s yours, you know, and that he’s raised not with his mother. I mean, she got to visit a couple of times. But you know, we don’t understand. I don’t think in the Western culture, and especially being in America or if you’re in England, australia, any of these countries, we basically do what we want to do, and the thought that you have no other choice, that this is your survival, these people are literally. They’re either thinking of personal survival or their children’s survival. You know, like you said, fathers working themselves to death. I mean, that’s unheard of here, it can happen sure, they’re literally dying from exhaustion.

0:31:48 – Peter Drummond
Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen it, many, many times I’ve actually seen someone on the side of the road yeah, really, yeah, wow, that’s real and I mean it’s hard to picture how that could be, how that could be a reality, um, but I had the most profound experience, um, when I was in india one time it was only, it wasn’t wasn’t that long ago and we’re out in one of these remote villages and this mother walks up and she’s angry and she’s yelling and she basically throws this baby at me, you know, and then, like, says something sharp to our team and walks off and they were like, well, they started talking to her. I couldn’t figure out what was going on, but her daughter was screaming and crying and all this kind of stuff, and so I just like, put her in my arms and held her Within about a minute she was fast asleep. This little girl was fast asleep, just out, like a light, you know. And so we filmed a couple videos. I was explaining about the sponsorship program, and then her, uh, this little girl comes up and crying, like runs up and starts trying to pull on her sister’s leg, and our team talked to her and they say something and they calm her down, and afterwards I was like, hey, what was that all about? To the team, you know? And they said, bro, you don’t understand what just happened.

That woman thinks that you’re going to take her daughter away. She said take this piece of trash away from me, I don’t want it. Hands me her daughter and walked off, thinking she’d never see her again. And the little girl who ran up was her daughter, thinking that I was going to sell her sister to someone. And so, of course, she’s grabbing her leg, trying to pull her away because she wants to save her little sister, like any big sister would do. But all of a sudden, I’m standing there in shock, still holding this girl, realizing that this lady is expecting me to traffic her daughter. Wow. And so I’m like. I told my team go get that woman. She’s taken her daughter back. Also, get all of the kids in her family. Take all of their information. We’re going to put them in the sponsorship program. No one is selling any of these kids, you know.

0:33:44 – Jaime Luce
And so.

0:33:45 – Peter Drummond
I handed this little girl back to her mom, immediately she starts crying again and my mom told me I told my mother about this and she goes. Peter, you realize that that’s probably the first time that little girl ever felt the presence of God, and that’s why she fell asleep immediately is because she was finally in the presence of her loving father, and she just fell asleep because she was at peace. Like what else would she do? And so it’s experiences like that where you go. Oh, this trafficking thing, this is real, it’s active and it happens even in the villages that we work in, and so that’s why we sponsor only the poorest of the poor, the ones who are way out there, that feel like they have no choice when they do. And so we get to teach these kids about the reality of the kingdom of God and invite them after demonstrating consistency, you know, and coming back out to these villages, we want to see these villages change. And we’ve actually seen a result. Because you know people say oh, peter, I can’t come on a missions trip right now. Sponsor one of our kids, but only sponsor them if you’re going to commit to praying for them. And the reason I say that is because when we pray, things actually happen. When we show favor to a place and a person, things actually change. And after our sponsorship running for as long as it has, we’re starting to see changes happen In one of the most remote villages in our program.

It’s actually where Sean’s sponsor child lives. There was no road, it was one of those two dirt lines and nothing. And we’ve got about I think it’s like 30 or something kids sponsored in that particular village and people have been praying for those kids and without anything that we’ve ever said, the government of their own volition built a paved road all the way out to those villages and about six months or eight months ago they got their first shop. It’s a tiny little store. It’s tiny, all it sells is junk food and warm soda, but it but it’s an improvement and life and wealth are starting to come to this village because people in America prayed for their kid that live on the other side of the planet.

Your prayers, if you actually believe your prayers, are powerful, they will be. You know you cannot pray and nothing happens. Because when you pray for these kids, yes, it affects them, it blesses them, it pours into them, it affects their future. Holy Spirit, when we partner with God. It goes so much further than we could ever imagine, because we’ve chosen to add our finite ability to his infinite ability.

And we’re actually seeing changes like that in a number of the villages that we work in and the government, if they knew what we were doing, they would shut us down overnight. But what we’re doing is we’re able to say, hey, look, what happens when you in America pray for a remote village in India. God’s kingdom is actually starting to come to these places. It’s absolutely extraordinary, and I wish I could give you more examples, but I can’t, because anything else that I would say would definitely get you in trouble.

You know, come on a trip with me sometime, you know, and we can show you the difference that it’s making you know.

0:37:11 – Jaime Luce
Wow, okay, so let’s talk about that for a minute, cause I know we’re running out of time here. Um, I want people to understand, cause that’s one faction, but you do have missions, trips that people can go on and actually expose them to whatever is really happening out there and play a part in reaching other communities and whatnot. I mean I love that. We first have to understand we should be praying for where we are. We don’t pray enough. We complain, but we don’t pray and actually take seriously that we have the power to affect where we are right now. But we do have that great commission in front of us that it’s not just about us, that we are to reach others. So go ahead and share a little bit about that.

0:37:57 – Peter Drummond
Yeah, absolutely Well, it’s just like you said. You know where Jesus says to love your neighbor. You know he also says in Matthew 28 to go to the ends of the earth. Is it either or no? It’s both. You know, like you like, be the first person to prophesy over your barista at Starbucks. You know you don’t need to be weird, but be that person who is always reaching out locally. But it’s so important to also go to Judea. You know Judea, samaria, the ends of the earth. You know that is. That is part of our commission. You know, not optional.

You know this is the gospel, and so you know, yes, we’d love for people to come on trips with us. We mostly go to the 1040 window because that is where the most unreached people on the planet live. You know India has over 2000 completely unreached people groups. You know we need people. Jesus was absolutely spot on throughout all time where he said the harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Pray that the Lord would send workers out into the harvest, and that’s what we need. So whether you, you know, sponsor a child and you reach out to the furthest parts of the earth that way, or you say, peter, I’ve never gone overseas before, but I want to get on a plane and come with you.

That would be amazing. I think it’s probably six or seven people, maybe even more, that have come on my personal trips. Their first time out of America was to northern Iraq, and do you know what happened every single time? They fell in love.

0:39:25 – Jaime Luce
Wow.

0:39:27 – Peter Drummond
My prayer for every single person that comes on a trip with Light, a Candle, is this that they would go somewhere, see something or meet someone that they can’t stop thinking about, because, as you step out in faith, the Holy Spirit is going to speak to you, about you and about what he’s called you to do, and he is going to start. He is going to add his Holy Spirit fire to that dream that he’s already put inside you. You know, like Jamie, god made you a certain way, he made me a certain way, and he did that deliberately. That wasn’t an accident. You’re called to reach people. The way that you do it, and you know the way I do it.

It’s very different than the way that other people on way that you do it and you know I the way I do. It’s very different than the way that other people on my team might do it. That’s fine. It’s not about what it looks like. It’s about are you obedient? And so I would encourage every person listening, you know, to this take a second after you know the episode finishes and just take a moment. Don’t go back to whatever busyness you need to get, to sit there and say holy spirit, what was the last thing you told me to do.

0:40:28 – Jaime Luce
That’s good.

0:40:30 – Peter Drummond
And listen to what he says. So if you want to, we would love to have you on a trip. We’ve got trips to India, to Egypt. We’ve got a couple of trips coming up to some other closed countries that I can’t mention. We have trips to a trip to the Philippines. So if you have a huge heart for trafficking, fighting trafficking, come to India, come to the Philippines. We’re doing extraordinary things in Egypt that people didn’t even think was possible. We’ve got trips to Kenya. So if you love coffee, that is a nice trip for you. I personally want to be on all the trips. There’s a bunch more trips that are up on our website. We even have a few domestic trips available If you’re for some reason not able to go overseas. We have a couple of domestic trips to, you know, even places like Wilcox County, alabama, which really just need a touch from heaven.

So there’s plenty of options. All I want to encourage you and all, hopefully, what you hear when you’re listening to this is ask the Holy Spirit what he wants you to do next you know, and take a small step of faith. And the thing is, if you feel like you’re called to a hard area or a hard place or a hard issue, the first thing that you need to have happen is your perspective needs to shift and see things from his perspective, because it is not impossible with God, nothing is impossible with God. And if we can realize that over our situation, we’re going to see his plan of hope. Like my pastor always says, any plan or any situation that you see throughout the lens of hope does not yet have the heavenly perspective. So we need to come up to the third heaven worship, pray, intercede, win the battle in the spirit and then it will manifest in the physical.

And like just one very quick story about that we were in India one time in a city and we went up to a high place. We were like where’s the highest place? It was this super cool, you know, 900 year old fort. We go up and we start worshiping over the city and the second that we finished worshiping, rain clouds formed at 10 o’clock in the morning out of nowhere. It was sunny, it went full rain clouds. It poured with rain over the city at a time that there would never be rain during the day for 10 minutes and then it stopped and it went back to sunny and we, the lord, showed us the physical sign of the effect of our prayers in the supernatural. So as we broke open heaven over the city, he caused it to rain in the natural and said look what I’m doing.

So there’s plenty of opportunities to get involved. We do a lot of projects and work out in Northern Iraq. There’s so many unreached people out there, places that people just haven’t gone yet, and our team’s out there every single day discipling, doing the good stuff. We have missions, trips that you can come on and you can sponsor a child and reach literally one of the most remote places on earth from home and I’d encourage you like, write to that kid as well. You know it takes a month for us to get the letters out there and back and translated and everything but um, you know, we want you to be praying over these kids, we want you to be prophesying over them. We want you calling out the gold in them. We want you going into their future and into the story that God is writing.

0:43:40 – Jaime Luce
Man, amen. Well, we have a great opportunity. I’d love to just encourage everyone who’s listening. First of all, we do need to be people of prayer. We need to be aware of these who have already gone and are paying the price and giving their lives and walking in obedience to do this very thing and walking in obedience to do this very thing, and, at the very least, we should be upholding them in prayer and even if you grab a little sticky note, put it on something that you see all the time, whether it’s your refrigerator, your mirror, or if you’re good about reading your Bible every day, put it on the front of your Bible.

Stop and pray that we are able to continue to reach the people that are unreached, that we want to see the return of Jesus and we know we’ve got to get out there and reach the lost and so many. I understand if we’ve got age and physical limitations or things that would hinder somebody from going, but you’re never hindered from prayer. You are never hindered from prayer, so I do encourage everyone to do that. I also would encourage you all to seriously, when this is finished, to do as we were instructed from Peter and to think about what’s the last thing the Lord said, and I want you to really ask the Lord is there something here that you want me to do, whether that’s sponsor a child, whether that’s go on a missions trip, whether that’s let the Lord lead you because you might be someone who can pay for a truck that needs to be on the road helping and bringing food to somebody. Whatever those needs are, there’s a part that we can all play. So I just encourage you all. Make it a real matter of prayer that you will do what God has called you to do. Be that one who says I want to be obedient, that I do understand that the fields are ripe and ready for harvest and I can be a part of that, that I can put my hand to the plow. Jesus said those who put their hand to the plow and turn back are not worthy of the kingdom of God. We’ve got to make sure that we are out there and we stay connected to what’s happening, and this is one way we can do that. So thank you, peter, so much for sharing with us what Light a Candle is doing.

We’re going to go ahead and put all of your information in the notes and links and things like that, so that people can reach out to you, and if anybody has questions, please do that. Reach out to the organization. You can get any questions that you might have answered those of you who are concerned with. He explained about how the finances work, but you can go onto their website and they are audited regularly. You can see what goes on. They are very much above board and transparent. You can see what’s happening with your funds and they can be trusted that way. So I just want to thank you for taking this opportunity to be with us. We’ll probably have you or one of your coworkers on with us again. Give us an update to what’s happening. I would love to have you all back and hear the testimonies.

0:46:45 – Peter Drummond
And so the website, for all of those of you who are wondering is lightacandleglobal. It’s lightacandleglobal. Please follow us on Facebook and Instagram as well. It’s at lightacandleglobal. So, instagramcom forward slash lightacandleglobal. And to sponsor a child, just go to lightacandleglobal forward slash sponsor and you’ll be able to see all the information there. Just like Jamie said, that’s wonderful.

0:47:13 – Jaime Luce
Well, thank you so much for joining us today. It was our pleasure to spend some time with you and help you see what’s happening in the world that you may not have been aware of and do something about it. We encourage you to do that. I’d love to hear from you If this has touched you or you have any questions for us. You can also reach out by mail or email, and that would be mail at jamielucecom. That’s J-A-I-M-E-L-U-C-E. You can also reach me on my website, jamielucecom, as well. Thanks again for being with us today. We’ll see you next time. Bye-bye.

Transcribed by https://podium.page