Spiritual Warfare

17 Aug 06
I was thinking last night, and I’m afraid it must appear that all I’m doing up here in Lopit is trouncing around in the mountains, falling down ravines and eating strange food. The problem is it’s a lot easier to tell those stories—the funny ones about cultural oddities—than to really get into the spiritual stuff that’s happening here. First, I guess, because I don’t always understand the spiritual things. Truly, I’m from the West, and these sorts of spiritual warfare aren’t familiar, they don’t into the system by which I unconsciously organize my experiences, my thoughts, my perceptions. And so it’s really hard to process through them in my own journaling, let alone put them to words that people back home can understand.

Last night, I had my first touch of fear since getting into Africa. The girls from Sohot (a village about a half-hour hike away) came over for dinner and as they were leaving right around missionary midnight (9 o’clock), we heard these strange wailing sounds from outside. And for some reason it just struck a fear in us. You know how you can feel your hair stand up on end? It was one of those times. And I’m not even sure why. You hear a lot of strange noises in these mountains—from drunk people yelling to children singing to women screaming to flutes… fluting—and I hadn’t really been alarmed by any before this. But these cries were ultra-foreign and chilled me to the bone. So we just joined together and prayed. And praise God, that his perfect love casts out fear. And the wailing also stopped.

The girls saw the source of the cries on the way home—some old guy just crouched on the path, rocking back and forth. They weren’t really sure what was going on, but they managed to pass him without trouble.

But, really, I was just reminded again of how I don’t really have hooks on which to hang these new experiences. So pray that as we learn the language and culture, we’ll be given the knowledge of how to understand and deal with these situations.