A month ago my team arrived in Mozambique after 2 nights and 3 days of travel (Saturday morning to Monday night). Entering this new country for the month, it was clear that we were truly entering a battle. Not a physical battle, but a spiritual one. A knock down, drag out spiritual fight was going on all around us all of the time. My team was tenting in the middle of a community outside of town in an area called Manga because of all of the Mango trees (and nope, we didn't eat any because they weren't in season sadly). When nighttime came, most nights the drumming also started. We fell to sleep to the sound of witch doctor rituals, and often woke up in the middle of the night due to spiritual heaviness in the air and the fear that it dispenses. And if it was a weekend night, you could have come over to our neighbors and partied all night long to insanely loud dance music that literally played all night long.
Not only did we feel the oppression and attacks going on all around us, but we sure as heck saw them as well. Our first night going to church started out pretty normally, I mean except for the fact that we were in a straw hut in the middle of Mozambique, with praise and worship, but somewhere in that time it started to get a little crazy. The spiritual oppression started showing itself in the physical bodies of those around us. People were falling over on one side and going through deliverance on the other. On Sunday nights we went to the large combined church service in town, which was like taking our experience at the small church and multiplying it by 50. The last 45 minutes of the service was devoted to healing and deliverance, and let me tell you, the battle erupted full force in that place, and there's no need to tell you which side won.
Why is this kind of spiritual warfare present in Mozambique and nowhere I've been in America? I'm not sure, but maybe it has something to do with the fact that there's no need for darkness to put up such a terrible fight as there's already so much in America that keeps people away from God without them having to do any work. So many look to material wealth and possessions for fulfillment. We're much to independent. Furthermore, we've all been fully immersed in our modernist culture where rationalism rules and tells us that the only reality is that which we can see, taste, touch, and hear. However, in Mozambique where they are waaay more in tune with the spiritual realm and aren't agents of modernism like the West, and where there are so many more people who daily look to God for provision for their most basic needs, they are warring, but not with knives or bullets. It makes me wonder whether maybe we in America are missing something incredibly crucial, and maybe we need a wake-up call because how in the world can we ever expect to win a battle that we refuse to acknowledge is going on?
