Happy Birthday to ME! I spent my 24th birthday in beautiful Uganda with five beautiful women and a bunch of beautiful Africans. I can honestly say this is a birthday unlike any other and one that I will never ever forget.
March is a lovely month of celebration and I got to share some of my celebration with Katie, who also turned 24 this year. Her birthday was the 2nd and mine on the 8th so our contacts threw us a joint birthday party on Sunday. They piled our plates with food and got us two cakes. The cakes were hilarious…they had to pull out the butcher knife and throw their body into it to cut them up 🙂 We sang and gave speeches and ate and ate and ate.
When we got there we entered a high school that was being affected by witchcraft from the highest levels of authority at the school. They were making sacrifices ultimately to Satan in hopes of progress and elevation in their school. They had cast spells on cats that roamed the grounds making the cats lives tied to the childrens’. So if a cat gets hurt, so does a child. If a cat dies, so does a child. Just the night before we came they had called in witch doctors who made the students participate in animal sacrifices and all the rituals associated with them. If they refused, they were caned. They targeted the non-Christians because they knew they would be the easiest to consume. Ceremonies like that one open the doors wide for demons to come in and take possession of the students and specifically for us, young girls.
When we got to meet the girls, there were at least five who were still possessed. So we immediatley started praying. I have experienced demons before and seen them manifest but this was different. There were so many. At the name of Jesus, the girls’ bodies started to thrash as the demons manifested. They were getting scared. The girls’ eyes would clamp shut and they would hide their faces, because demons know they cannot stand before the living God. Some of the girls took longer than others and some demons put on a bigger show but all were released and freed from the stupid, evil grips of the devil. It was amazing watching the immediate change in their countenances as soon as the demons left. They sat right up, looked all of us in the eyes and were able to start eating and drinking. They were freed. Smiles retrned to faces and tears fell. Lifeless hands we’d been holding returned a grip. It was beautiful.
All the girls ended up professing Jesus as Lord and were given instruction on how to defend themselves against similar attacks. Some of them started showing us around their dorm (it was a boarding school). They showed us the damage they had done while they were possessed and they showed us the piles of ashes left over from the animal sacrifices of the night before. We got a chance to pray over the building and the grounds and we are trusting that God’s angels are going to be keeping watch for them.
Unfortunately, events like this one are common at schools throughout Uganda. We get to see more and more every day what is actually going on in our world. It’s all real and it’s everywhere. I think I can say we were all honored to be a part of those deliverances and it was such a blessing to see the power and love of Jesus at work. He is always stronger and always loves the hardest. He always wins. We also know that the more we learn the more responsiblilty we carry, which means life looks different. So life should get interesting.
The rest of my birthday was lovely, though not quite as eventful :). We continued with our door-to-door ministry and I am always so blessed by the people we meet. I also got a Justin Bieber themed dance from my teammates and had we not had such an eventful morning, it probably would’ve been my favorite part of the day! All in all it was an unforgettable day for sure. 🙂
