Spiritual warfare is a real thing. That was made abundantly clear to me a couple weeks ago.
I want to give a bit more context to the story I told last week about the possession that my team witnessed. At the beginning of our time up in the mountains, our host told us that on our last day there, we would be hiking to a temple. It would take several hours each way to get there, and it would be strenuous – it was the highest place for miles, and we could see the peak from where we were camping. I was on board right away with the idea of the hike – I knew I could get some gorgeous photos from up there, and that the way up would be an experience I likely wouldn’t get again.
That wasn’t the point though, obviously, and he continued to inform us that this would be a prayer walk. The temple at the top of the mountain, we learned, was the place in Nepal where the highest number of animal sacrifices were made – over eight thousand every year. The people made sacrifices to the spirit that had control over this region – the same spirit that we would encounter later in the week. That number was mind boggling to me. It was another one of those facts that, in my head, I understood was a real thing that still happened, but to hear it and see it was another altogether. On the day we would be making the hike, there was going to be a large ceremony happening at the temple – one of the largest of the whole year. We would walk through it, see the people, see the event, and continue on to an empty part of the peak to pray over all of it. Even at the beginning of the week, I loved the idea.
Four days after learning this plan, the spirit disrupted our camp.
Two days after that, we made the trek to the temple.
All of the students from the Bible school that we had been teaching, including the girl who had been attacked, came with us. While we were walking and getting closer to the peak, the idea hit me and a couple of my teammates that this might not have been the smartest move to bring her. When we asked our host about it, though, he asked whether we should show the spirit fear by leaving her behind, especially in light of what had happened just days earlier. He added that her presence and her prayers would be made all the more powerful by her personal experience with this spirit, and having her come along was not at all a mistake. He convinced me.
_______________
I wrote a post five months ago during the first week of the Race, back when I was in Colombia. It was on the idea of prayer walking and intercession, and how, at that point, these had been foreign concepts to me. (You can read it here if you’d like the full context). Prayer walking and intercession aren’t ministries with tangible, immediate results, and this, in my narrow mind, made them seem like a waste of time. I’ve come a long way since then, and obviously my mind has been changed. Even during that hike in Nepal, though, there were lingering pieces of that still in the back of my mind.
On the prayer walks through our neighborhood in Colombia, many of my teammates, on several different occasions, would stop the group at certain points, saying that we needed to take a moment to pray in that exact spot. They had felt a certain darkness, or a spiritual heaviness, or just a pull from God to stop. Obviously, I never argued or challenged those feelings. Who was I to say they did or didn’t feel those things? However, I never personally felt any of that. I never felt any specific urge to stop and pray in specific locations. I prayed over what our host told us were struggles for people in the country, city, and neighborhood, but nothing ever more specific than that.
We are encouraged on the Race to debrief our experiences every day, to examine what went well and what didn’t, what was challenging or new and what was familiar, and how we saw growth in the team or in certain individuals. I’m better at this now, but early on in the Race when everything was new and I still had no idea what was ever going on, I didn’t want to voice those feelings. I didn’t want to feel like the odd one out when it seemed like everyone else was on board. So I stayed quiet, and vented all of my feelings into blogs for all of you to read. Some things still haven’t changed.
_______________
All of this to say that I finally get it. It took me five months, and in that time I honestly haven’t thought about any of this a whole lot, but on that trek up the mountain, I understood what my teammates meant when they stopped. I understood what they meant when they said they felt darkness. Granted, where I was in that moment – a very rural mountain in Nepal – was drastically different from an urban street in Medellin, but maybe that was the point. Maybe I needed to walk into a place where people were literally sacrificing animals to demons for it to finally click in my head. Honestly, I would have been concerned if I hadn’t felt anything. That place was wild, and it gave a lot more context to the possession that we had recently experienced.
As we walked, we could hear the music from the ceremony from miles away. It got louder and louder the closer we got, and when we finally arrived at the stairs leading up to the temple, we saw what was going on. We weren’t actually allowed inside the temple, even though my morbid curiosity wanted me to push ahead. There was singing and dancing and a lot of rituals that I didn’t understand, but I understood enough. There was a spiritual darkness here. I felt it even before I walked into the temple. We all did.
As we walked through their ceremonies, our group obviously drew a lot of stares. I can’t imagine they get a lot of white people interested in what they are doing. It didn’t bother me, though. It might have a few months ago, but not now. It mostly just made me sad. There were hundreds of lost people giving their lives in dedication to demons, and they had no idea. (I wrote that sentence, and immediately realize that maybe that is something else I needed to learn from this experience – something that I had to come to such a dark place to understand. Because, in reality, there are lost people around me all the time, and it’s honestly never bothered me nearly this much until I walked through that temple. It needed to become more visual, I guess. Now it has been.)
We drew more stares from the music we were playing. I brought a bluetooth speaker with me so that we could worship at the top of the mountain, but playing music and worshipping as we walked through the ceremonies seemed like a good place to start. I had a song in my head the whole way up that had never felt more relevant than it did in that moment. The song was Victor’s Crown, and the specific lyrics that I had been singing were from the chorus: Every high thing must come down // Every stronghold shall be broken // You wear the victor’s crown // You overcome, you overcome. Those lyrics are repeated in the song over and over, and I played it on repeat as we walked. It was my prayer – that somehow, some way, God would reach these people. That they would come to realize what they were doing, and for them to tear down their own place of worship. God asks us to pray bold prayers, and that’s about as bold as it gets in that situation.
When we got through all of the crowds, and broke away to the clearing that was our ultimate destination, we spent over an hour in prayer for this place. I don’t believe that I will ever see the direct results of that, but I believe there will be fruit from it just the same. There has already been fruit in my own life, and in the lives of my teammates. That’s a big thing that God has been teaching me throughout my whole Race experience – we are only in each place for a short time, and as such we often won’t see the results of our work. But that doesn’t matter. We don’t need to see the results. We just need to be faithful to what God is calling us into in each place, and trust in His timing for the rest.
At the end, before we went back down, we built an altar. It sounded like a weird idea to me at first, but I went with it.
I was reading a book the other day called A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. I recommend that everyone read it. It’s wonderful. I read it in two days. Towards the end of the book, Donald Miller writes about altars, and it made me think of and reflect more on that scene on the mountain two weeks ago, and why we did it. He writes:
I like those scenes in the Bible where God stops people and asks them to build an altar. You’d think He was making them do that for Himself, but I don’t think God really gets much from looking at a pile of rocks. Instead, I think God wanted His people to build altars for their sake, something that would help them remember, something they could look back on and remember the time when they were rescued, or they were given grace.
I want to look back on this time, and this place, and remember all that God taught me here. I want to remember all of the ‘first’ experiences I had, and allow them to be catalysts to move me forward in my faith not only for the remaining months of the Race, but for the rest of my life. Because these lessons are important. They are about how I see people – how God sees people. They are about the realities that the Western world often chooses to ignore. And they are about how, even though we might never see it, by being faithful to God’s calling, we will make a difference, even in the darkest of places.
