My parents immigrated from Holland to Canada in 1953 with my two oldest siblings, Andre and Jolanda after the war. They started their new life in a new country and did fairly well. My parents had The Dutch Store which sold all kinds of Dutch goods to the community in that part of Ontario. One of my earliest memories was driving with my Dad in his white paneled truck full of products to sell from one farm to another before he opened the store.

We were also part of the Christian Reformed Church, and, at some point, my Dad became an elder and was a recognized leader in that community which was mostly Dutch people as well. All of that is to say that we were not your typical “revival” or charismatic types. So, when God decided to pay us a visit, it took us all by surprise.

My sister, Jolanda, had just started going out with a military guy in Chatham and was visiting his parents. Her nose started to bleed and wouldn’t stop. She was a top honors student in Grade 11 at Central Huron Secondary School and was just recognized as the Athlete of the Year. No flies on her. Not the sickly type. But her nose wouldn’t stop bleeding. They brought her to the hospital, and they diagnosed her with acute leukemia with only a couple of months to live.

This was in 1971, don’t forget. Cancer treatments have advanced quite a bit since then, especially for leukemia. In her case, it was a death sentence. Amid a flurry of doctor’s visits and long stays in the hospital, she became a Christian and wanted to make her Confession of Faith in our church. The doctors warned her that it could kill her since she no longer had an immune system to protect her from the mass of people that were likely to come. She did it anyway.

I remember being in the upstairs gallery where the young people and latecomers would generally sit. The place was packed with Christians and non-Christians alike. Many friends from school and relatives and friends from all over. I remember having a difficult time seeing her as she lay on her hospital bed all covered in white linen. Her boyfriend wanted to marry her (although she was only 17) but she declined since she had committed herself to follow Christ.

Thousands of people were praying for her as you can imagine, and my parents decided to ask for donations to buy Bibles dedicated to Jolanda. A new current English version had just come out. They asked the High School if they could use the cafeteria to have a meeting to talk about Jolanda and hand out Bibles. My brother, Andre, reports a bit of a revival in his life at that time.

He ended up going to Bible College in Wales and studying linguistics to work with Wycliffe Bible Translators. Another girl from our church became a missionary in Bangladesh. The young people’s group was affected for years afterward even when I became a part of it four or five years later.

One family’s tragedy resulted in a mini revival that affected hundreds if not thousands of lives for the sake of the gospel. I think Jolanda would be pleased. Certainly, God was. That’s the interesting thing about revivals. They are the true “life support system” that God uses to promote evangelism and transformation within and outside his church.

Take the City of Saskatoon as another example.

Ebenezer Baptist Church was a fairly normal church in a bit of a backwater city in a second-rate province in Canada. I’ve been to Saskatoon and there isn’t much to see. It’s not very big. Pretty average city and fairly normal people. Ebenezer Baptist Church got a new pastor who wanted to do some evangelism and grow his church like any self-respecting pastor wants.

But the church was dead. Evangelistic efforts proved worthless. Programs didn’t work. Plans were a waste of time. The problem was the people. They talked about revival, but they didn’t want to do the work.

So, the Pastor changed his tactics and started preaching about the importance of prayer. There is no revival without prayer. So true. He finally got a few deacons together on Saturday night to pray and God showed up. People were starting to get convicted of their sins of complacency and laziness when people’s eternal lives were at stake. The pastor preached about the confession of sin and the need for honest transparency. People started to open up and admit their failings. People started to reconcile with each other.

On Sunday morning, people would go into the basement to pray while the worship service was happening above them. God continued to work. They prayed for the desire to have a revival. They prayed for a spirit of prayer. That’s what you do when you have hit rock bottom. God can create new, holy desires in his people as a precursor to revival.

The same thing happened here in Argentina before the revival happened. People would spend hours praying for specific people as well as revival in general and even confess their sins and reconcile with others, knowing that it was a pre-requisite for God’s anointing presence.

The same thing happened in Saskatoon for two years. The head usher stood up one day in front of the church to confess a bad attitude towards the Pastor and a few others in the leadership of the church and asked for forgiveness. He went home and confessed to his wife and children that he was not a very good husband or father.

He went out to his barn to work and was immediately filled with the Holy Spirit from head to toe. Nothing crazy mind you but he was sure that God had shown up. His ministry expanded exponentially from that moment on. He was a farmer with an eighth-grade education, but God used him mightily.

And he wasn’t the only one. More and more people started to come to church, and they had to find bigger facilities and have more meetings per day until they had maxed out the biggest auditoriums in the city. Thousands of people showed up and hundreds of people became Christians. The chief of police reported that people were showing up at the precinct to confess to crimes that they had committed.

Shopkeepers had an influx of people who confessed to shoplifting. Relationships were being healed. Teams of missionaries were sent out to share the news of the Saskatoon Revival throughout Canada, the United States, and internationally. Hundreds of teams reported thousands of new believers from every part of the globe.

And all of this happened at the same time as the mini-revival that happened around the tragedy of my sister’s death. God was at work. He is busy at work in the valley of dry bones bringing new life through the work of his Holy Spirit. Confession, Repentance, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation always seem to be at the heart of it. Sometimes the trigger event is a tragedy that he turns into something glorious. Evangelism is always the result.

My sister understood that God was her “life support system” and that she was in his hands and under his care even when things were getting dangerous for her. Her public confession of faith in the context of our family tragedy was a testimony that God could use to change hearts. The rest doesn’t matter.

We think that our finances, our positions, and our social status are the life support system that sustains us in this life but when we give ourselves to Him to be used in whatever way He sees best, we find that our value system changes as well. When you make your testimony more important than life itself, you begin to understand the priorities of God.

The kingdom of God is full of transformative paradoxes and when we start to take them seriously, well, anything can happen.