Climbing the Mountain

Over the past two days, I’ve experienced a huge transformation. I am out of the valley and climbing up the mountain again. I believe that this is the blessing that I was waiting for in June. I have a feeling other blessings are still to come.

There is so much to tell about this week. I’ll begin with the healing that I’ve had. It was right around the time of my last posting, when we had taken Hailey to the hospital here. I felt like I was at my breaking point. I felt almost mentally unstable, not knowing how I was going to endure the remaining weeks here and envisioning every horrible scenario imaginable. I don’t know what a nervous breakdown feels like, but I can imagine I was close to it. In a nutshell, I was gripped by an overwhelming sense of fear that was suffocating me. Not knowing what to do, I sent an e-mail in the morning to our Pastor’s wife, asking for prayer and expressing my feelings of fear and being overwhelmed. Not only did they pray, but they came over that evening to spend time with us and pray more. It was an incredible time of fellowship and prayer. Both Pastor Thomas and his wife Molly encouraged me with scripture and prayers. Most importantly, I think, is how they showed me that I have been living under the oppression of the spirit of fear. I agreed and had even told Adam the night before, in the midst of the fear, that it really felt like spiritual warfare and I now needed to fight.

Pastor Thomas and Molly could see immediately that it was spiritual oppression. After a time as we were praying, Thomas’ eyes went to the china cabinet in our living room with a lit display case. In it, we had a large carved ceremonial elephant as well as many other small ones. Knowing that we’d most likely spend a fair amount of money on them, Thomas asked if he could be frank with us. We of course said yes. Unbeknownst to us, elephants in full ceremonial dress are Hindu idols, and we had put it in a place of prominence in our house. He said that we should consider removing them from the apartment, and showed us scripture to support this. The bible is very clear about God’s displeasure with idols. While Adam and I discussed it and how we might handle it, we thought of giving them to the Hindu guy that manages our apartment. We prayed some more and literally the SECOND that we stopped praying, the doorbell rang, and it was the apartment manager (who never comes in the evening, mind you!). We promptly bagged up the carvings and gave them to him to take away. The thing that really convicted us to get rid of them too was that the very night that we bought them, I started being plagued by demonic dreams. I had a strong feeling that it was something to do with the carvings. Another neat thing that came out of the situation was that Pastor Thomas mentioned later in church that the speed with which we made our decision and the equally quick action was a lesson for him in his habit of procrastination.

I have had another experience like this before involving spiritual warfare, and at the time I didn’t understand why God would allow it. Eventually I realized that He allowed it to bring a bad situation to light so it could be dealt with and removed from my life once and for all. This is definitely the case here. It wasn’t so much having to do with getting rid of the carving. The main point was to bring to me to that place where I was so utterly backed into a corner that I had to do something, like make the decision to fight the oppression and accept Jesus’ truths. Thomas used a great analogy from a Malayali movie, where a guy robs another guy by putting a carrot to his back, pretending it was a gun. The analogy really struck a chord with both me and Adam. The enemy is holding a carrot to our backs! Why do we give in to him so easily? We give the enemy way more power than he has or deserves.

We have been blessed in such a tremendous way by Pastor Thomas, Molly the son Rohith, the daughter Manju, her husband Jereen, and Manju and Jereen’s one year old little boy DJ. Its like we’ve known them for years. Yesterday was Adam’s birthday, and the whole family surprised Adam and came over in the evening with a cake. Jereen was traveling to the US later that night as well but still came over. It was a very touching and special gesture. We only have three more Sundays with them. Its heartbreaking to think of leaving them.

Praise God for being such a faithful father, even when we don't understand the work that He is doing in us. Blessed be the name of the Lord!