Today was really the first day since I started my downhill spiral that I really won a battle in this war. It definitely didn’t start out like a winner, in fact it began just the opposite.
I woke up around 10 am and laid in bed not wanting to be disturbed by anyone. I had work at 4 pm and so my plan was to stay in bed until 3, go to work, come home and go back to sleep. And I would have if I hadn’t made lunch plans with a guy down the hall named Eli. I wanted so badly to cancel on him and just lay there all day. Also in the morning, two people on mission send messages to the GroupMe message for us all to read. One of them, from my friend Sara, shared with us on mission how the night prior her brother accepted Christ into his life and wanted to learn what having a relationship with him was like. The other message from my friend Hannah was a message asking people to post or to text her with specific prayer requests so she could more completely pray for others on mission. These two texts stood out to me because of how I felt immediately after reading them. I was furious, and felt filled with anger and disgust towards both of the messages. And this was something that I picked up on and knew was not how a Christ loving person would react.
During lunch, Eli asked me how I was doing and I just opened up completely to him. I told him how I didn’t feel like I had been myself the past several weeks and how I didn’t feel like I was contributing at all to the community here. I also told him how I was having a very hard time praying to God and felt very disconnected to Him, as well as how the text messages from the morning affected me. After I told him these things he said he was getting the feeling that I was going through spiritual warfare and that I was being attacked by Satan. The fact that I didn’t feel like myself, and that I couldn’t connect with God or with other people, he said, is exactly what the devil takes enjoyment in. I of course had no idea what this all meant and just asked what he thought I could do. He gave me some really good advice, the main theme being to pray to God even though I don’t think I can. And then he prayed over me and really asked God to come into my battle and to rid any evil that had come over and taken hold of me. I remember having the same hatred towards the text messages fill me as soon as he started praying and it made me shake while I was sitting trying to keep still. I felt like I was going to explode and really wanted to get up and run away. As he was praying I started to feel the weight and the hatred slowly leave me and my shaking eventually turned to tears. I don’t know how to better explain it other than I feel as though I had been attacked and evil had taken root inside me and I couldn’t get rid of it the previous couple weeks. It really wasn’t until Eli prayed that God cast out anything not of Him and His love that I started to feel light again and not be consumed by hatred. Continue reading
