Three of my teammates and I set out in the morning to our sweet town San Lorenzo, with 2 silver buckets, 2 towels, 4 bars of soap, and 1 Spanish bible. Our first house belonged to a precious abuela and her daughter. The second also belonged to an abuela, accompanied by 4 of her grandchildren. The last was an abuela, a mama, and many beautiful little girls. We shared with each home the story of Jesus washing his disciples feet and how we wanted to be like Jesus in doing that for them. In Guatemalan culture feet are looked down upon and are seen as unclean, so us doing this was very weird for them. It was such a humbling time to get to put ourselves on the ground before them and love them the way Jesus does.
After our day washing feet in San Lorenzo, we went to our Friday night youth group in Chimal with out ministry hosts, and before we were about to leave a woman from the house next to ours asked us to come pray for her son. He was walking on the street one day and all of the sudden he couldn’t see. That had been 3 years ago. They said they prayed for him often and had many people pray over him, but never saw healing. So they decided to take him to a witch doctor. We don’t know what the witch did to him, but we do know it created horror in their home. The boy would often feel a dark presence holding him down at night and was unable to move. So we asked that he kneel on the floor and we prayed that Jesus would just enter the home and cleanse his body of whatever evil was in him. The boy chocked and spit up on the floor as we continued to pray and cry out of desperation for Jesus to take ownership of that place. When he rose, he still could not see, but we believe that there was some spiritual healing that happened, rather than the physical healing he wanted. We then anointed the home and just worshiped while we allowed the Lord to bring his light into the darkness.
Our work is not finished in that home for we believe that there is still darkness lingering, but we know the Lord was present and did miracles in that home while we were there.
If I’m being honest I was terrified. I had never been in a situation where I experienced the devil like that, and I didn’t know how an 18 year old girl like me could make a difference in such a horrific place. The Lord continued to remind me that he gave me the same authority he had while on earth, so if he could cast out demons… so could I. So, along with my teammates, thats exactly what I did. It’s crazy to think that there is so much power in the name of Jesus that all you have to do is speak it out and the enemy will leave.
As you can tell this day was pretty draining. We saw a lot of joy, laughter, peace, relationship, and restoration, but we also saw a lot of darkness, depression, and fear. When you’re following the Lord it’s easy for days like this to happen because as much as he wants you to experience his goodness he also wants to use you to cast out darkness. I’m thankful he challenges me with days like this because if following him was always easy I wouldn’t get to see his light glow in all the dark places.
