Actress and outspoken Christian Melissa Joan Hart recently spoke about her mission trip to Zambia, Africa, in partnership with humanitarian organization World Vision.
"It was really eye-opening. It was encouraging," Hart told The Christian Post.
Hart traveled to Zambia with her husband and three sons, where they visited families in need, including one family she has sponsored in recent years. During the trip, Hart recounted a conversation she had with locals regarding prayer.
"It's a Christian country, and almost every household we went to they were praying with us. But they couldn't understand why we pray," Hart said. "They couldn't understand why we pray when we have so much. They're like, 'It's weird to see a family pray that already has everything, like what would you pray for, or how would you pray?'"
"Sometimes I think, in our country [the United States], we hear people more likely say, 'Why would I pray, everything's a wreck? Everything's falling apart around me. God doesn't care. Why would I pray?" Hart explained. "But what they're doing, they're like: 'Well, we need to pray because we need our goats to be healthy. We need rain to come but not too much. We need our crops to do well. We need our children to be healthy. We need our school to be improved."
Hart, who starred in God's Not Dead 2 and the hit 90s sitcom Sabrina the Teenage Witch, also spoke about her faith. Although she grew up Catholic, Hart eventually became a Presbyterian after marrying her husband, Mark Wilkerson, who was Baptist then.
"Everyone's always talking about their moment of coming to Jesus or their moment of being born again. I feel like I've always walked with God, it's just gotten deeper and closer and more fulfilling," she said.
She also shared that the story of The Footprints on Sand and the testimony of Katherine Wolf touched her life and taught her how to pray.
"While I was in a mom's group [at the church], Katherine Wolf fell into a coma because of an aneurysm. And we, the mom's group, wanted to pray for her. They wanted to surround her with 24 hours of prayer. Everyone had to take an hour. I just had my second son, so I was breastfeeding at night, so I took something in the middle of the night," Hart recalled. "I get my son out of the crib, and I'm feeding him, and I start to pray, and I did my Our Father and my Hail Mary, and My Glory Be, and then I didn't know what to do, and I had 55 more minutes."
"I feel like that's the moment that really opened up my prayer life. I had a big moment there where my prayer life changed and where I started to understand more about how to pray, and then my husband also helped me," she added. "My husband taught me to pray for mercy."
Hart is connected with the Community Bible program in Connecticut, a Bible study she's been a part of for the last 13 years. She also shared with The Christian Post the exact moment she was born-again.
"I did have a born-again, Holy Spirit moment," she recalled. "I never really understood the Holy Spirit or the Trinity in a sense. One day, we were in Bible study, and it just hit, like the Holy Spirit made sense to me all of a sudden!"
"One day, I just felt it, and I was like, 'Oh my gosh, that's the Holy Spirit talking to me. I get it now,' she continued. "Like a lightning bolt just hit me, and I was like, 'The Holy Spirit! I don't know why it just hit me, and I got it.' Then I better understood the Trinity and all that."
"My father-in-law once said to me, too, about the Trinity – because I was struggling to understand that – he said, 'Well, I'm a father, but I'm also a son, and I'm also a brother, and I'm also an uncle. And he said, that's how God can be all these things, so that hit me too."
Photo courtesy: ©Getty Images/Matt Winkelmeyer/Staff
Milton Quintanilla is a freelance writer and content creator. He is a contributing writer for CrosswalkHeadlines and the host of the For Your Soul Podcast, a podcast devoted to sound doctrine and biblical truth. He holds a Masters of Divinity from Alliance Theological Seminary.
