This past week, my team and I got to stay in Guatemala City with a lady named Lauren, also where D Squad’s Unsung Heroes stayed. Lauren works for an organization called Hope Renewed and the house there was essentially their base, even though only one person lived in it. I guess it all started the first night there when my teammates, Morgan, Chelsea and Carmen, had very demonic dreams about demons attacking them. The morning after we all talked to Lauren about and she wasn’t shocked at all. She, herself, was having bad dreams as well, along with uneasy feelings during the whole time she had lived there. There would be nights where she wouldn’t be able to sleep until it was light out again and other times where she would feel a dark dark presence.
After a lot of prayer and asking God what we should do that day for ministry, as she previously explained to us the different options and places we could go, we all came to consensus that we were supposed to stay there and serve Lauren in any way possible. A couple things that Lauren came up with was doing an ATL (Ask The Lord) around the house, which entailed going room to room asking The Lord what He wanted us to get out of for that room, aka what spiritual darkness was there and to pray over it and cast it out. We were like oh awesome! We should probably do that first and get that over with, thinking that it was only going to take an hour or two. But boy were we wrong, this was a long and draining 3 day process that The Lord had challenged, yet worked through with us. Lauren anointed us with anointing oil and spoke over us Ephesians 6, putting on the full armor of God.
We first started with the upstairs back bedrooms and bathroom, which believe it or not, took basically the whole day. We anointed the doors and worshiped in the places we felt the most spiritual darkness was hiding, which we ended up finding was in the bathrooms. After feeling spiritually exhausted and drained, we went to sleep and called it a day. The next day we finished the upstairs while doing the same anointing, praying and worshiping. The third day we did the whole downstairs which we found was a lot less spiritually dark. One thing we all got at the end of each day was that almost everything lead up to the staircase that led up to the roof. The bedrooms and bathrooms that we felt were the darkest, always led to the staircase. It almost seemed like the whole house was built around this staircase. At the end of the third and final day, we ended with the staircase and the roof, thinking that this is where the source was going to be, and don’t get be wrong, it was pretty dark and I felt very anxious, but it wasn’t what I had been expecting. Along with all the other rooms in the house, after we prayed over them and casted them out in the name of the Holy Spirit, it felt lighter and less anxious, which was how it felt in the staircase and on the roof as well.
After we prayed over the roof we had an awesome worship session for an hour and during this time, God revealed something amazing to me and something that I will remember for the rest of my life- Yea, we totally just casted demons out of this house and that God gave/ and continuously gives us complete authority over the devil. But what we just did is so small compared to the bigger picture. As I was looking over the city I realized that not only are we called to cast demons out of Lauren’s house but that God is using us to cast out demons in other places too.
The day after, we painted and remodeled the house, reclaiming it to be a house of The Lord, a sanctuary and place of peace, rest and freedom. We are called to be the light in the darkness, a light in this city and to speak our authority over the devil. God is so good and we must remember this- Anything the devil does to us, he must ask permission from God first. So this week God said yes, let’s test their faith and see them be obedient to me. Looking over the city made me realize that there are millions of people living in the bondage of the devil and believing lies that the devil puts in their heads, but we are here to cast them out and to pour the blood of Jesus Christ down the houses of this city and in the places that The Lord is not living in. It’s so crazy how much I and our team have grown spiritually. 3 months ago, we would have walked in that house and not have felt any differently, but only because of how much The Lord has opened our eyes, did we see what was really living there.
