This month I am working in Lilongwe, Malawi in the southeastern part of Africa! So far it has been awesome but everyday is so full of events it is hard to keep my blog updated on all of them. So today I’m just going to update everyone on what happened yesterday.
This month we are working with pastor Harvey and living in our tents in his backyard. Harvey and his wife have 2 little girls and a little baby boy named Walter. Harvey works for a church called Living Waters that has about 13 branches of smaller churches in villages. Earlier this month we went and lived in a village and walked to neighbooring towns of unreached people groups. Its was awsome! But more on that later…
Yesterday we went into a village where one of the branches of living waters church is located. We went door to door to talk to people and see where they were spiritually. If they didn’t know Jesus we would talk to them and tell them of God’s love and how relationship with Him is accessible through Jesus. If they already knew Jesus we would encourage them and answer any questions they had. The second house we stopped at we met a lady named Katherine. After Jake, Kendra, and I had talked to her a while she told us that there was a lot of witchcraft around the area and she felt she was spiritually attacked at night because of that. We of course prayed over her and prayed over her house that God would protect her from all of the darkeness around her and free her from any attack of witchcraaft that could have been brought into her house. Though this intrigued me a lot for some reason I couldn’t get the story of Daniel in the lion’s den out of my head. It was running through my head so strongly I could barely pay attention to Katherine and then she mentioned that the older people that were involved with witchcraft had started a school lately and how they bring in the children during the days and teach them.
As soon as she said that God was like, “Now!”. He really turned my focus back to Katherine and placed the fire in me to fight back. God led me to ralley up children and fight against this spiritual darkness trying to creep into His children. If the evil was going to try to ralley up the children they better beleive that God is going to fight back and reclaim His children. So I asked the children to gather around and told them that my teammates and I were about to go have lunch but afterwards we would all meet under the tree because I had a story to tell.
After lunch we went around gathering children and then had to wait a while for them to come. As soon as we sat down there were about 10 children but I just felt God telling me to wait for more so I did. About 30mins later, there were around 20-30 children. I then told them the story of Daniel in the lion’s den and told them how powerful God was and still is. I explained that God is soo great you have to be without sin to go before Him but that because He loves us so much He makes it possible. I told them how God sent Jesus to be our sacrifice for our sins so that we would be seen as worthy enough to enter His presence. I told them that because of Jesus we can not only enter His presence, we can also experience His power. I explained that we could even have God’s power work through us through His Holy Spirit living in us. I told them that God’s power is always working for good and it works out of love. I told them the power of God is much stronger than all powers of evil even withcraft.
I asked the children if they wanted to experience God and His love and they all of course yelled yes! They told me they had faith in God and that they wanted to be freed and healed! It was awesome!!! We started to pray for healing from God and what I saw was just mind-blowing! For the next 10-20 minutes children were laying hands and praying for each other! Their faith is something we should all have. They have no doubt in God. Its almost unreal looking back at how everything happened.
Before we ended it to start church for the adults, God gave me the courage to ask if any of them had been involved in witchcraft and would like to be freed from that. If God calls us to something He is always faithful in working in it. Right after I asked a little boy named Omosis came up and said he had been in witchcraft and wanter freedom through God. So all of us ralleyed around with His children and just prayed that God would free him and cast out all evil that was at work in his life. As we told the evil to leave we asked the Holy Spirit to come. I prayed for the Holy Spirit to fill the little boy and I have no doubt that He did. God is soo good all the time:) Praise God for the freedom He brought yesterday!
As some of you already know, for about a year and a half I have claimed rain as my God sign (a sign from God personally to me that He has worked in that moment or just that He is proud of me). Because we are in Africa and it hadn’t rained even a drip since we’ve been here I didn’t expect God to show up in that way– but I was wrong! Right as I ended my time with the children it began to rain! It was the first rain of the rainy seaon here in Malawi! It poured! Praise God for all the ways He shows up!
Though the rain was a sign from God, satan also tried to use it. satan was very mad about all the children that had chosen God that day and he definitely fought back.
Check out my next blog to hear the rest of the story…
