I wrote this a couple of months ago while I was in Nepal. It is about all that I saw I learned while I was there, specifically in my first month. About the spiritual world and how real it really was and how I had not realized it before. It is pretty long, but there was a lot to say.
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Spiritual Darkness, Spiritual Warfare, really just the Spiritual World I guess, both good and evil. You hear abut it, but I feel like most people don’t really think too much about it or have experienced it, or even want to talk about it. It’s freaky, kinda scary, you don’t want to believe that there is something you cant see going on. But let me tell you a little about what I have been learning about it.
My first time really ever experiencing it was when I was younger. I would have night terrors and nightmares involving demons, and scream until my mom came in to comfort me. I felt a sort of darkness hovering over me at night and it was terrifying. She would come and read Pslam 91 and pray over me and declare in the name of Jesus that Satan and the demons had to leave. As I had gotten older, I was able to pray before the fear really started to paralize me, and slowly it has faded away.
But something I have started to realize since arriving in Nepal, was just how much fear did have a hold on me. I was scared to really have the darkness come close to me and to really call Satan out and tell him to leave forever, for the fear that it would get worse. See I knew I was a child of God, but it didn’t really hit me just how much weight that title held. That is until recently.
Since arriving in Nepal, we started Womanistry and Manistry month where the guys and girls were split up doing different ministry, lot’s of the girls started to get sick right away. Personally I just thought it was due to the drastic change in temperature from a solid 70 somthing degrees to a low and fridgid 40-50 degrees (shout out to my MN people I bet you laughed at that). But after a day of ministry where we worshipped at the top of a hillside, then explored a Hindu temple, I realized that was not the case. Before we entered our apartment after the long day, our squad leader Lesley prayed over us before we went in. She explained that in Nepal, becuase of the different religions of Buddism and Hinduism, darkeness was everywhere and evil spirits could latch themselves to us and not just affect our team, but the whole group in our building.
As we really started ministry, we were getting sick all the time and were not able to join ministry for the day. One night the squad leaders had us all come together and pray for the sick because the sickness we were getting was Spiritual Warfare. We prayed for the sick then we called Satan out and said he had no place in our home or in us. Since being on the race, I have come to find how much being a child of God means. As we were calling Satan out of our home I started to call him out for all the fear he has caused me. Telling him that he can’t touch me anymore because I am a daughter of the King, and he literally has no hold on me anymore. I started to cry cause I felt so much freedom in that moment. After that I stopped getting sick.
We visited Hindu and Buddist temples a few times to walk around and praying to ourselves for the people there, that they would one day know Jesus. On temple days I have since been interupped by being; attacked by a goat (which I had been conviced was demon possesed since I had walked in), interuppted by 2 Hindu priests trying to give me food/drugs, just asked to have pictures taken with me multiple times, an old lady has tried to get me to walk away with her (and a man warned me not to), my head has felt foggy, I have felt naucious, and had headaches, all starting right after walking in and stopping once I left.
About a week in we found out we would be spending 8 days in a far village where not many people had heard about Jesus. They said that Spiritual Warfare is very intense there since there is very very few Christians. It was a village that had been known for horrible crimes and selling women, and that the police would not even go there because they feared for their lives. But that was before a church was started there. After the church arrived in the village, the police came in because crime had gone down. But still very few had heard about Jesus.
So we headed to the village knowing we would be without wifi and showers for 8 days, and not really knowing what to expect. We started with door to door evangelism, but many of the people we talked to did not want to follow Jesus because they feared the persecution it would cause them. We talked to two women who told us they had read the Bible, but did not want to become Christians because they feared that their family members would beat them. It was very discouraging to hear.
We continued to do this for the first couple days, and then started to focus on encouraging the Christians in the village. We listened to their stories of being healed when they were sick and coming to Christ, one man was even a witch doctor but was healed and became a Christan. One day a woman came asking for us to pray for her. She was sick, and in pain because of some condition with her heart. We all prayed over her, and she said she was no longer in pain and no longer felt sick. She had come many times asking for prayer for healing but was not able to attend church because her husband forbid her from it. We prayed for her situation and hoped her husband would allow her to become Christian. This was just the first miracle.
Throughout the week we encouraged Christians and talked to non believers about Christ. Some girls had the oppurtunity to pray for a deaf man and restored his hearing. My faith strengthened a lot during these few days. All of us girls became closer as we talked about our lives, fears, and things we were most passionate about with one another.
The night before our last day of ministry in the village, I got sick. I had a fever and horrible aches and pains and it continued into the next day. I didn’t want it to keep me from going to ministry, but unfortunately it did. But God did not want me to miss out on the coolest thing I may have ever been able to witness.
After all of the girls had come back from ministry, a boy was carried into the church. He had some issue with his spine, where he was unable to walk and stand on his own, if at all. We all surrounded him asking his mother what was wrong with him. On top of his spine issue, he was depressed with suicidal thoughts and he is only about 7 or 8 years old. So we prayed for him. We prayed for about 30-40 minutes and I was asked to close. Something I have been working on is not being so fearful of praying out loud. At Training Camp, the leadership team did listening prayer for each of us and wrote a letter about what they recieved. At the end of mine it said “Your biggest weapon is prayer, pray boldly!” and just recently I realized that I didn’t really pray bold prayers like God wants us too. So I decided to talk to God about praying boldly, and how much I really really wanted to see this little boy walk to his momma. After we had finished praying we all held our beath as someone asked him to stand up and try to walk. We watched as he grabbed the wall and stood, and the tears started to fall down our faces as we watched him take slow steps towards his mom. We watched as his mother hugged him sobbing because her son just walked, sobbing almost as hard as she was. It was something I will never forget, and something that has caused my faith to grow immensely.
Nepal has been hard and exauhsting in so many ways but I wouldn’t have liked it to go any other way for how much I have learned and how much my faith has grown.
