“God is about to crack the sky and it’s about to be over,” says Rahwa Yebio ’05 as we sit in her apartment, sipping homegrown lemongrass tea.
Colorful wall hangings Rahwa brought back from her semester abroad in Ghana surround us. We are both leaning forward in our chairs. Rahwa has her eyes rolled up and she is looking at a large circular light in the center of the ceiling.
“The apostle Paul lost his mind for Christ and I think that’s reflective of my story,” she says. “I have allowed God to renew my mind.”
The interview began downstairs in the living room, where Rahwa felt uncomfortable telling the story near people who may have been skeptical. So we moved upstairs into her bedroom.
“I understand where those people are coming from,” she says. “Before I went to Ghana, I would never have believed I would be the one preaching about things like Jesus or the Holy Ghost. My father is an atheist, I stopped going to Church at age ten, I was against organized religion, and I had begun to lose hope that there was a God.”
It has been almost a year since Rahwa’s profound spiritual conversion, and she is eager to tell her story to those who will listen. It began in Accra, the capital city of Ghana, where she spent a semester studying the African slave trade. There, four classmates from Chicago asked her to come to Bible study with them.
“I think Christianity is a cult,” she answered bluntly.
But she went anyhow, and a few days later she found herself hanging out in a hotel room with her new friends.
They told her they could speak in tongues. They explained that for a man to do this, “God must be speaking through him or for him, because the human mouth cannot pronounce the syllables of the language. It is the language spoken in heaven.”
I interrupt Rahwa to ask if the human ear is capable of hearing such a language accurately.
“I can’t really say what it sounds like,” she recollects. “But when they were praying that night, they began to speak in tongues, and all I can say is that it is beautiful.”
Next, one of her new friends prophesized about what Rahwa’s mother was going through emotionally at the time, and later wrote a prophecy about Rahwa’s own life, including accurate descriptions of her high school experiences.
“God began to break down the bricks around me. I had no control over it. And I didn’t understand why it was. That’s how powerful the spirit of God is.
”The next night we had Bible study and they said, ‘Rahwa, you can receive the Holy Ghost tonight, all you have to do is believe and repent.’ They explained that the way you wait to receive the Holy Ghost is with your mouth. You praise God, saying over and over, ‘Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Praise God, Praise Jesus.’ I felt something from the right side of my foot swoosh up in me, I felt incapacitated for two seconds, I felt like I was flying, then I dropped to the ground. I said ‘What happened?’ and they said, ‘God just sat on you to show you he’s real.’“
The Pentecostal movement, of which Rahwa is a part, is a sect of Christianity that believes the spirit of the Holy Ghost can help people prophesize, cure the sick with their hands, and speak in tongues or languages they don’t know. On a side trip to the city of Commenda, Rahwa and her friends spoke with a man who claimed to have had spiritual experiences with spirits other than Jesus. Rahwa’s friend was trying to convince this man that he should pray only to Jesus, but he did not agree. They had been conversing in English, then all of a sudden the Holy Ghost entered one of them and they began speaking to him in Fanti, the native language of Ghana. He even took on the aspect and gestures of a Ghanese person.
”It was pretty funny,“ Rahwa laughs.
During a side trip to Benin, a small country East of Ghana, one of the students from Northwestern was laid out on his bed with a high fever. He had been diagnosed with malaria. Instead of calling a doctor, the friends said that God would heal him.
”The thermometer said 104.1, I think, and it was the most deadly form of malaria,“ Yebio said. They laid hands on him, spoke in tongues, and two minutes later he got up and his forehead was cool and his bone pain was gone.
Rahwa is just as excited about her spiritual awakening now as she was while witnessing these apparent miracles in Ghana, and with the help of her four friends from Northwestern, she has started a movement at Wesleyan that she calls the Holy Ghost Fire Movement. At a school thought of as being anti-religious, she is glad the movement has encountered little opposition. But Rahwa says she can feel a spirit of fear on campus, a spirit that may grow more aggressive as the movement continues to convert students and distract them from sinful activities. So far, three people have been filled with the Holy Ghost, and five people have been baptized.
”It is something that God has already spoken about with me. It is already happening.“
Meetings are held at Rahwa’s house, 43 Home Ave, Thursday 7 p.m.
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