Father of Light

I am venturing to write about something that, in truth, I feel I have little authority to, but it has recently been a part of my life. I don’t write about this because I am filled with fear, or because I want to make you see how spiritual I am (or maybe unspiritual) or to make my little life seem more exciting; I’m writing because I am learning just what it means to serve a POWERFUL, RIGHTEOUS, ALL-LOVING God.

            It’s a little hard to draw all the loose strings together in a comprehensive way, but I’ll start with what I was experiencing just recently. It happened a couple times while I was still with my parents in Canada, in August, and also again in the first week that I started school here in Bodenseehof. They were all very similar, so I’ll just describe the first: I went to bed, without worries on my mind (I thought), and I was working so hard physically that I was actually sleeping really well at night, for the most part. I had just been through about a week of not dreaming a single thing, and this night was the same. I cannot remember having dreamt anything, but in the middle of the night, I woke up, drenched in sweat, panting, and very very scared. I didn’t know what it was, or why I was so terrified, because I hadn’t dreamt anything, but I felt smothered by fear and I couldn’t operate. I sensed darkness, and that’s the only way to explain what it was—an almost tangible darkness. Without registering why or what was going on, in the next couple seconds I knew that I had to pray God’s truth. I was almost unable to make the words come out, but I knew I had to verbally speak the truth of the Word. I started saying, out loud, that Jesus Christ had died for my sins, paid the price for sin and death with his blood, and that I was under protection of that blood, in the power of his resurrection. It’s so hard to describe this, but immediately after I had said a few words of truth (I had my eyes closed still), there was light in my mind. Not like a light being turned on, because it still seemed unreal, and I didn’t really SEE it with my eyes, but like a camera flash—right in my head. My mind’s eye wasn’t dark anymore, and with the very brief flash of light came an intensely strong flash of peace. I was so tired and out of it, and the fear was gone so quickly that I prayed a tiny bit more, and drifted back to sleep, thinking nothing more of it until the morning.

            I forgot about this incident until I came to Bodenseehof. In the first week of school, I had another dream or two, with the very same experience, although not as intense. I began to wonder what was happening, and I felt like I started to understand that I was being spiritually ‘attacked’. Not in the sense of a physical, life-threatening thing, but my mind was being taunted, and I had to fight in God’s name to keep the fear out of my heart. I shared with my roommates about this, and a week ago I also shared with my small group, who prayed for me.

            I forgot about the whole thing during the week, apart from a conversation with another student, where we shared similar experiences and talked about the awesome power of God to control the “powers of darkness.”

The last week here in Bodenseehof we had a guest lecturer who spoke about prayer and intimacy with God through prayer. As a student body, we experienced a lot of break-throughs. Last night we had a prayer service for the whole student body. It was called ‘standing in the Gap,” where we shared requests for people in our lives that were struggling, seeking God, or just in need of some prayer. It was over two hours, and in small groups, we prayed over every single person that was presented; most of them just names to the rest of us, and yet, several who prayed, including myself, were moved to tears of empathy, feeling the heart-break and pain of some of the unknown people we were praying for. It’s dangerous, because God answers prayer, but as a student body, we have been praying for God to ‘break our hearts’ for what His breaks for. I think there was some breaking last night, as we lifted up the loved ones of each other before our Heavenly Father, asking Him to intercede in their lives and draw them back to His open arms.

            One of the girls, T, shared a request for herself. She said that she had been having several nights of terrifying anxiety and had not been able to sleep for a while, being so gripped with fear. I didn’t say anything to her, but I empathised with what she was experiencing. We started at 7:30 and our prayer meeting ended at about 9:30 and we were dismissed. I wrote an email to my parents, and then started getting ready for bed. As I was walking to my room from the bathroom, one of my closer friends here, R, called to me and told me she had just been spiritually attacked. She was a little bit shaken, and asked me to pray with her. We went to her room, and she told me how, just seconds earlier, she had been in there with a friend, and as soon as the friend had left, the room had filled with a thick, dark presence. She was scared, and felt smothered, and she started instantly to pray over the whole room. She asked God to drive out whatever was in it, and it did leave. That was when she called to me. We both went in, and I prayed with her again and over the room, commanding Satan to leave and stay away. She was fine, feeling safe and secure in the knowledge of God’s protection, so I left her again and went to my room. I was literally in bed, with my ear-plugs already in, just about to switch off my light at about 10:30, when the same girl came to me and asked me to go with her and a few other girls to pray over our building.

            When I went out to join the small group of girls, I found out, as they shared, that several of them had been having similar experiences to mine, and T’s, and R’s. Over the past couple days and weeks, some of the girls had been having night terrors like mine. A few of the girls had had them just the night before—we had not told each other about them until now. We decided we needed to pray over our building, and our small prayer group turned into about half of the girls in the school. We shared what had been happening with our RA, and she encouraged us to pray over the building, driving out the fear and darkness in God’s holy name. We held hands, went through the rooms and hallways, and prayed out loud—again and again commanding the devil to flee in Jesus’ name and through the power of his blood. While this was going on, one of the girls, A, who had not joined in with us, was filled with fear.

            I don’t have the right to assume what was happening in her heart, and I don’t want to say anything falsely. I don’t really know what was with her, but I can say that I knew she was struggling with God since we came to school. Without knowing more, I don’t have the right to say much about it, but while we started praying, she was somewhere else with a couple girls, and she began to be extremely upset. Again, I can’t say for sure, but she was groaning, and as we moved through the hallways in prayer, we came to where she was in the stairway with the RA and a few other people who were praying over her. She started to writhe and scream out.

            I don’t know what to think about demon possession, and I don’t believe that true born again believers can ever be inhabited by demons, but I do believe in oppression, and I know that fear is extremely powerful. We prayed more. It felt like a battle; a real struggle, and we prayed passages that came to mind. We prayed for peace, and thanked God for His sovereignty, and the protection that we can find by resting in his presence. I have never before been so aware of the power of God!

            Shortly after 12:00 our RA advised us to go to bed, whoever could sleep, and most of us did. I lay awake, trying to read my Bible and I listened to the Lord’s Prayer in a song, and I kept praying, but I have to be honest; I was scared. I felt for the girls that had just had experiences, and even though I knew that God was victorious and had full reign in my heart, I was still scared of more encounters with the darkness that seemed to be trying to sneak into our school. One of my roommates had been up in prayer, and I asked her if she’d sleep with me. She came to my bed, and I was able to go to sleep, not hiding under my covers like an 8-year-old scared of the dark. We prayed together one last time before drifting off.

            I am exhausted this morning, having had about 5 hours of sleep. The morning is encouraging, and I am SO confident of the power of God. I haven’t seen A yet today, but there was an army praying for her; a small one here in school, and a multitude above in heaven.

            I suppose it makes sense that Satan would be aggravated with our school. We are stomping him out in our lives, inviting God in. We are making heart changes, and going to God in community, dying to sinful self and rebuking the evil in our lives. Satan has reason to be angry! And I say let him fume. Our hope is in Christ, the Solid Rock, the Maker of heaven and earth, and the Victor of all powers—light and dark. 

Hello Again

I feel like it’s about time I posted a more positive account of what’s going on here in Germany. The problem is that SO much good stuff is going on that I have gone beyond the point of having the motivation to recount it all and am now having to force myself to write anything.

            Here’s a whirlwind account of the past week and a bit:

1. Lectures are great! I am still being challenged daily and struggle a bit with finding the time to process what I hear. It is also getting much harder to stay awake and alert during the morning lectures especially.
2. The room situation is just fine. God performed a little miracle in our situation: all ten of us girls are more on the introverted side, and even though we have a range of sleeping and waking times, from anywhere between 9:00pm at night to just after 5:00am, nobody has died of lack of sleep, and somehow we are not bothered by one another. Many of the other girls have said that our room is much quieter than some of the rooms with only 4 girls in them (praise God!)
3. I fell in the sauna and hit my jaw on a bench going down. That was a little more than a week ago, and since then I’ve been to the hospital once and a private doctor. It hurts a lot, and makes concentrating in lectures difficult, but I am SO thankful that nothing more happened than just a chipped tooth, some big bruises and whip lash that will heal with some time. The best part about all this is that my travel insurance covers all the medical costs! I’m learning to appreciate just what insurance means. It’s great.
4. I was going to be running a 10K race today with most of the rest of school, but because of my sauna incident I was forced to take the day off. It’s not so bad after all. I needed some down time to catch up on reading and this blog post and other stuff.
5. Yesterday we went as a school to Neuschwanstein Castle, and on our 2-hour journey there we drove through torrents of rain, sleet and snow…BUT upon arrival just below the castle, the sun was out in all its glory and the sky was a perfectly clear blue! We spent several hours wandering around the castle, enjoying the sunshine and beautiful views all around. Before heading back to Bodenseehof we stopped at a place that had ‘summer sledding’, which is pretty much bob sledding without the ice. It was fun going down the track, but actually the best part about that place was its playground. It had a big playground with big equipment like swings and zip-lines that could carry adult-sized humans, and a see-saw, and most of the students (from the age of 18 to about 26) played for most of the time on the playground. We pretended we couldn’t read German so we could ignore the sign that said the playground was for children 12 and under. I feel a little bad for the one or toddlers that had been brought to play and had to compete with some really big North American kids.
6. I had expressed earlier this week, as the staff were setting up outreach groups, that I would love to work with the Turkish community, or immigrants of some sort, since that would be familiar to me. One of the couples spoke to me and told me about a personal outreach that they had started a few years back, and invited me to join them. I went with them on Wednesday to a community of immigrants nearby. The husband played hockey with the young boys, and the wife and I played with two adorable little girls and a boy too young for the hockey. I could tell these kids LOVED the couple from school, by the way they were so excited to see us show up, and I was so impressed by how this couple is reaching out in a small way to show love to these kids that so badly need Jesus. One of the girls grew very quickly literally attached to me and it was a huge effort to pry her off of my arms and legs when we left. I cannot wait to go back this next week! The school organised groups so that most of the students have some sort of outreach position, whether it be on a music team, with the kids for Sunday school etc, and I tentatively requested to be an English tutor. I didn’t know what to choose of all the options, and I prayed a lot beforehand that God would guide my decision and the staff’s ultimate decision in putting me in a group. Since choosing to tutor, I can see that this was the perfect spot for me! We are a small group of 5 and will be taking kids around 15-16 from various nearby schools. We’ll do some bigger group discussions with them, to help them practice English, and will also have more one-on-one tutoring or a few kids to a tutor. Apparently we can be counted as the kids’ teaching aids, so we may be invited to their special school programs, we can take them on field-trips, and indirectly we can witness to them, although official Bible studies will not be allowed during tutoring hours.  I am so excited to see what opportunities God opens for us in the next 6 months!

So that is what has been going on, minus a lot of details.