This morning I went to ICM on my own (Ben walked with me, he had a logistics meeting today), and it was sweet to have the place and the kids to myself. There are about 4 main Ayahs that work there so the five of us got to sit and play with the kids together and I was able to take some of the load off of their hands that morning by watching the children. One of the Ayahs is there because she is a cook, and this morning she gave me some of the food that the kids were having…it was an AMAZING chapati (kind of like a pita) with a curry/vegetable sauce. Bomb. Some days there are huge blessings being on the World Race, and homecooked native food is one of them.
After lunch, I ended up sitting with Imelda, one of my friends working at ICM this month. She was talking to me about some of the things that her team has encountered doing village ministry, which we were scheduled to do that night. The Holy Spirit moves in crazy ways out here, ways that aren't "normal" in America. One of the things that had happened to her, was that she put her hand on someone's head to pray for them (Indians ask for a lot of prayer from us), and they shot to the back of the room and stood up and they were healed. Like WHAT?! Even Imelda, someone who is pretty radical in her faith, was blown away by seeing this. Imelda also has the gift of spiritual discernment and can see the spiritual world in the physical (another girl on the squad who has this that I've talked to describes it as "worse than living in Paranormal Activity" all your life), and was seeing demonic manifestations in people (another girl on her team without this ability saw this happen with her at one point). After hearing all of this I was completely intrigued with going in to the village and was so curious to see what it might bring and what I might see firsthand. I have seen things in the spiritual world (it's actually one of the things that brought me to believing, because it was so apparent and in front of my face), but never anything like what Imelda was describing. Imelda and Isaac prayed over me and Ben, because Ben was preaching that night too, and then we went off on our way to get ready for the village.
Later that night both of the teams working for SCH left for one of the villages (all done up in our sarees with bangles, naturally). When we got there, we met the pastor of the church we'd be preaching at and then went to an old tobacco farm to pray for people and announce the service that night. After we did that, we split up into our two teams and started going from house to house, asking if anyone needed prayer and letting them know about the service. We prayed at a couple households. People are eager for anyone to pray for them and gladly invited us into their homes. We were able to have some good conversations about the Lord and talk to them about what they believe as well. It was starting to get dark, and someone needed to use the restroom, so my team went back to the church to just hang out and wait until the service began.
During that time, Sharisse suggested that we should pray as a team before the service started. While we were praying, the other team came in with a woman who was speaking in crazy tongues and jolting around. Someone turned to our team and said "she's got a demon" …and then we all looked at each other, and someone said "keep praying." So we prayed, and then went over to the woman. Someone from the other team explained that when they had gone into her house, they asked if anyone in their home needed prayer. Almost immediately after that, she fell to the ground, started jolting around, and started speaking in another voice. The translator said that she was saying that she was another name, and her husband was someone different. I guess she said also that 20 years ago she had fallen into a well and had inhabited this woman's body. That's pretty much all that I know–all I know is that this woman was talking and acting in a way that was completely subhuman.
We gathered around her and were praying against whatever had taken a hold on her, and then suddenly she snapped out of it, and looked around with the most confused look, asking "what am I doing here? who are these people?" We gave her some water, and then she rested. When she woke up about a minute later, she was back in the altered state. This time we gathered around, continued to pray, but then each person started to do something different to battle. A couple people kept praying, a couple were singing worship songs, some were reading from the Bible, some were speaking in tongues. It was the most incredible display of how the body of Christ is supposed to work and go into a fight like this (that's the back of my head below–I was one of the people reading scripture).
After a period of time (I'm not sure how long), the woman started calling out "Jesus! Jesus! Help me!" and then she started crying and praising the Lord. Our translator said "it's over! She is free!" and we prayed over her, that the Holy Spirit would fill her and that whatever was in her would flee and not come back. I'm still praying (and you can too) that this woman is fully free from that demon, and that seven more wouldn't come back to haunt her (Luke 11:24-26). Also please pray that she knows that JESUS is the one who saved her from this, and not one of her other gods. The Hindu religion has so many gods that oftentimes Jesus is just thrown in to the mix instead of distinguished as the God of gods and Lord of lords.
After this all happened, Ben preached the gospel to the group, we prayed over more people, and then went home on the most ridiculous and uncomfortable public bus ride home. Seriously, I will never complain about a little pothole in a road again after this trip. Most places other than America have roads covered in them.
So I definitely got a crazy village experience–other teams who go into the villages have experienced things like that regularly this month (one girl saw a man's withered arm heal right before her eyes). I am not an expert on things like this, nor can I fully explain it outside of the Lord just doing work and the spiritual world manifesting in a physical way, but all I know is what I saw and this is a small explanation of that! God is way bigger and works in ways that are far greater in magnitude than we'd like to think in our small and comfortable American ways of thinking about Him, and I've seen it firsthand in other countries that are open to the ways he moves and also that open themselves up to the spiritual world. It's really cool and blows my mind constantly!
[Photos courtesy of Meredith Cockman and Caitlin Sickler]
