You may think I am crazy after you ready this but this stuff is real. Satan is real. Witchcraft is real. There is the world we see everyday and there is also a spiritual world we don’t always pay attention to because we have so many distractions. In America it is easy to hide the spiritual warfare going on around us, but in other countries there is not anything to hide it with. Nicaragua was one of those countries.
We got to our ministry site excited to spend a month in paradise. We had it all: beds, western toilets, showers and an amazing view overlooking the lake. It was perfect on the outside but the spiritual world was going crazy. Fourteen of us felt the spirits of oppression, mockery, laziness, perversion, greed, and idolatry. These were all prevalent to us literally all month long. We either had bad dream or could not sleep at night.
Let’s backtrack to last year. A squad mate had a conversation with a cab driver in Managua and asked him about the island we had just left. He began to tell her some pretty disturbing stuff. A group of witchcraft doctors all over the world came together on this island and had a satanic ritual. After that ritual, the island had a pretty wicked atmosphere that hasn’t been broken yet. That explains all the bad dreams, the feeling of laziness and the prevalent idolatry.
Personally I was attacked in my sleep. I didn’t have nightmares; I just couldn’t sleep more than 2-3 hours a night. So after a week or two not sleeping much, I began to get run down and tired all the time. We struggled with feeling with ministry was not enough. We were only cleaning and spent time with the kids for an hour. Living in what first seemed to be paradise turned into complete chaos. After the first week people started getting sick. There was a week or two that went by with half of us in bed sick, getting over sickness, or at the hospital. It was a mess. Some had a parasite, some were severely dehydrated, some had stomach infections and one didn’t know what they had.
Although there was a lot of spiritual attacks going on within our team and we had no idea how we were making an impact on these people, we were blown away by what God did in one of the kid’s lives. So there is this girl named Connie. She is nine years old and she is a feisty one. When we first got there, we noticed she was different than a lot of nine year olds. She had something inside her that wasn’t right. We quietly prayed for her when she was around. We showed her the love of Jesus hoping something that we said would click and change her. We went to church for the last time while in Nicaragua and something huge happened. The pastor asked the kids if any of them wanted to accept Christ as their Savior. Without hesitation Connie ran to the front wearing her cute little yellow and white dress. All of us started smiling and our eyes were filling with tears. This little girl wants to give her life to Christ and we were a part of that. So she prayed with the pastor then some of us prayed with her. It was the most amazing thing to see a little girl transformed because God’s love is so stinking strong. The last few days we were on the island, we saw Connie a smile on her face and just her demeanor completely changed.
So yeah, month three in Nicaragua was not what we expected but we still saw God move in so many ways, even through the darkness.
