Before the race, if you had asked me about spiritual warfare I really would not have known what to say. I could’ve quoted something from scripture or something from C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters might have come up, but other than that I wouldn’t have had much of a clue. I had never experienced it before, and it had not really been a hot topic of conversation in my life. The whole idea of it made me uncomfortable so I just avoided it as much as I could.
Then the race started.
I left every comfort I had ever known and every person that I had ever loved to go on this crazy adventure around the world for almost a year. As you can imagine, things got messy really quickly. I started to experience hardships and feelings I never had before. In Thailand, I was wrecked as my teammate and precious friend was in a terrible car accident and had to go home. In Cambodia, my heart was ripped out of my chest as we left behind our ministry who had become as close as family and who my heart still aches for 5 months later. In Vietnam, I wrestled with not being free to share my faith openly and feeling the heaviness that comes with chains of silence and oppression. South Africa brought a whole new batch of struggles. My entire squad worked through the pain of not being able to go to Mozambique and having to fight with everything we had to get visas to go to India. Swaziland brought in apathy and heaviness. My team and the other two teams we were with battled against the enemy’s attacks that seemed to come from every direction. Right across the street there was a house that worshipped their dead, and my teammates were plagued in their sleep by terrible nightmares. Everyone felt the affects of the battle raging all around us.
And now we are in India.
The place we fought so hard to get to. My team is in an amazing house filled to overflowing with God and His presence. Yet, the enemy continues to attack, and for the first time, its been personal. Since the second night we were here, I have had incredibly vivid nightmares. Usually at home I rarely remember my dreams, and they are almost never anything unpleasant. But here they are so real- demon possession, death, being attacked and beaten, torture. In the mornings I woke up still feeling the tragedy and horror that had been in my mind the night before. It was terrifying and I could feel the apprehension building as I closed my eyes to sleep at night.
We talked about it as a team and truth was spoken into the situation that it was indeed a spiritual attack. We started praying together before we went to sleep, asking for God’s protection and infiltration of our minds and dreams throughout the night. I still had some really terrible dreams, but then I started to notice that after those dreams I would have another one right before I woke up that was filled with joy and comfort. Whether it was going to my beach, being with my family, or sitting in front of a warm fireplace on a cold day, I woke up with these feelings on my heart, not the fear and heaviness I had been feeling.
I was still pretty confused as to why God would allow me to have these nightmares at all though. Why would He allow me to suffer? Then my mind went to a Psalm that I had been reading and digesting during our time here- Psalm 107. Throughout this Psalm, God’s people go through hardships again and again; they are lost, imprisoned, tortured and dying. But every single time they call out to God and He comes to their rescue. Not only does he rescue them, but He brings them to better things, good things. In this, God lets them go through hard things yet at the end of every single one of them He is right there to comfort and save them. This is what God does with my dreams. I am learning that although I will go through suffering, He is with me through it all and after the suffering He has good things planned for me because He is my protector and provider. The suffering brings me to a place that leaves me in complete dependence and need for God.
So even though there may be pain in the night, I am learning to cling to the hope that JOY comes in the morning.
