The price of a blessing . . .

It wasn’t a far stretch for anyone in or around the Castries Town Hall to think that perhaps maybe the world was in fact coming to an end.
This week crowds of people flocked the building in hopes of seeing the African ‘prophet’ they had heard was in Saint Lucia. On the inside it was an even more chaotic scene. Apostle William Braham was in town and everyone wanted to be touched, prayed for, anointed with oil or even better, witness a miracle first hand.
I went to see first hand what all the talk and commotion was about, and perhaps even score a one on one exclusive interview with the prophet himself.
The Town Hall was packed on Wednesday but one woman lifted her hand bag and eagerly offered me an empty seat. At the time prophet Shorn Jules was preaching and he told the gathering among other things that he would bring some of the greatest men to St Lucia. Later it would be Apostle William Braham’s turn, and that’s when things got really interesting.
Braham singled out a man in the crowd, asked him what his pain was and proceeded to heal the man who claimed he’d been suffering with a stiff neck for years.
“Now tell me where is your pain?” Braham asked. “Do you feel any pain?” The man responded no.
The African went on: “When God heals your pain it’s forever,” then went onto the next objective. A young boy and his mother were brought forth and Braham asked, “Is it because of your pain you don’t go to school?” The boy’s mother said he stayed home for two days sometimes, not being able to walk. “Do you feel the pain now? Don’t cry,” Braham said prophesizing: “I saw the father is spiritually getting into some things and it’s affecting the boy.
The boy’s mother put in: “He said if I don’t bring the boy for him, and anything happen to him he’ll cut my neck.”
“After a while he won’t be able to walk,” Braham continued suggesting that the boy was being used by his father in some sort of evil deal. “Do you know that whatever is happening with him is connected to the father?”
The people inside the packed Town Hall were urged to pray for the boy and they willingly obliged, raising their hands in praise. The lunchtime prophetic ministry and prayer went well beyond the 2pm end time, and at the end of it all, some people seemed reluctant to leave. Some stayed back to collect their bottles of olive oil which had been blessed, while others fought for a chance to talk to or even just touch the prophet. Braham left as soon as the ministry was over.
“I just want to talk to you for just two minutes,” one woman begged as the remaining prophet Shorn Jules tried to leave.
Since I’d been at the Town Hall from morning, and given that organizers hadn’t kept their promise of asking apostle Braham if he was willing to do an interview, I tried to get Jules’ attention.
At first he acted as though I was coming to him to seek some kind of blessing. He spoke to the crowd saying, “Even if you come to me, if the spirits don’t want me to see you I won’t.”
I stepped aside and tried again, explaining exactly what I wanted once he’d managed to maneuver the throng of people. This time he directed me to their PRO. “That’s why government ministers make mistakes all the time,” he said. “That’s why even if you put a camera or mike in front of me, sometimes I just wouldn’t speak.”
I pressed on: “Even if we can’t do an interview today, anytime this week would be good.”
“Yes we can meet… sometime. Don’t worry, everything will work out,” he said walking away abruptly, leaving my “sometime when?” floating around somewhere in the sweat filled, stale Town Hall air.
Everyone seems to have their own outrageous version of something that happened or was said during one of the Glorious Fire Ministry conferences at the Town Hall or the Gros Islet Secondary School. There are mixed reviews and some of the positive messages on Apostle William Braham’s Facebook page read: “St Lucians have all what they have to say but man of God I tell you no weapon formed against you shall prosper. Continue the works of the Lord. We love you and we believe in you.”
“You are truly a man of God!” another note read. “I thank you for helping me to release the fire that I have in me through Christ Jesus. May God continue to bless you in your work as you bring the message across that the Lord is with us.”
On the contrary, one woman told the STAR she’d talked two close friends who needed some sort of breakthrough in their lives to go to the one of the conferences, and went along with them, only to leave disappointed.
“A lot of people who had issues and really needed answers, they went for some kind of hope, some kind of deliverance in their lives,” she said. “People who were oppressed by all kinds of issues in life, demonic oppression and things like that; they went because in the Bible the scripture says, God has given to men different gifts.
“Based on what we
saw or heard, he was a prophet of God. People have gifts of prophesy, gifts of healing and teaching. Everybody doesn’t have the same gifting so we figured if he has a gift of prophesy we can hear what he has to say, and receive from the impartation. What I saw had me questioning a lot of things. I found the reality aspect of it, there was something lacking. Truth lacking.”
She went on: “Based on my biblical principles and what I know, it was contrary to what I was seeing. People who really needed the breakthrough or deliverance, they were not able to get it. There was a point where he was calling forth the different denominations of money; those with $1000 come up. He said he knew it was not for every body. He said he knew not everyone was going to come; this blessing was not for everybody. Obviously not everyone will have $1000.
“I don’t know if it was to give a blessing for business people or whatever it was. Then he was calling another group, those who could give $500 there was a blessing for them. It was like a seed offering, an offering for what was happening.
“The people who really needed it didn’t have that kind of money. They stayed in the pew. These are the people who really need miracles, signs or wonders in their life and they didn’t have the money so they stayed by the way side. That was my deterrent. That was what I felt bad about.”
Our witness went on: “I spoke with other people afterward and they told me the services prior to the one of Friday made no mention of money or anything like that. He was just walking through the congregation, calling out people, speaking into their lives and telling them what was happening in their lives.
“The people I brought didn’t even get prayed for and they would not have gotten prayed for based the sequence of what was happening. They came back home with all their issues, suicidal thoughts, negativity, depression, demons, all the things they thought they could get somebody to really help them breakthrough.
“My friend still didn’t give up. She called a number she saw on the flyer to try to meet with the prophet and she was told that she couldn’t see him one on one unless she gave a seed offering.
“I was very disappointed because God doesn’t work that way. He meets our needs freely. Freely you give, freely you receive. I know in this society we need to pay for everything but there are certain things money can’t buy. There are times we need to use wisdom and stop following the first thing that sounds like a miracle. I would not go there again and I would not tell anyone to go.”
Apart from coming across the Facebook page of the prophet who lives in Amsterdam, Netherlands, originally from Kumasi, Ghana, and the Facebook fan page of Thumpet to the Nations, the independent institution or spiritual grouping responsible for apostle Willam Braham being here, there was no information online about apostle William Braham.
In fact the name that kept popping up when the search engine tried to correct my search, was William Branham, a man some believe was one of the most influential bible ministers, and others saw as one of the most controversial prophets from the Voice of Healing Movement. Branham died in 1965 from injuries from a car accident in Tucson Arizona.
The African prophet will reportedly be in Saint Lucia for the rest of the month. Hopefully at some point he will be ready to speak with us about his work and what brought him to out little isle.