Now that we have arrived at the hotel in El Paso for debriefing, I will be able to post more pictures from the trip. The previous post is the first many "picture posts" I will try to put up between today and tomorrow.
Here's a snapshot of how our final day (yesterday) went of the ministry portion of the trip.
MORNING - We climbed the nearby sand dunes where we had our Time Alone With God, prayed together and sang together. One of the reasons we went to the dunes was because it's a great place to few the surrounding communities and to observe the beauty of God's creation (i.e. mountains, etc.) The second reason we went to the dunes is because a lot of satanic rituals and killings take place on these dunes on a regular basis. Individuals at a seminary across the street from the dunes have testified to seeing people killed and raped there. Often satanic groups will climb to the top of the dunes right where we were and will claim the area for Satan. So we went to pray against the work of the Enemy at this place and to ask the Lord to take back this ground that has been used as a place of evil.
AFTERNOON - We divided up into 3 teams to go out a pray for the people of El Millon. We had the chance to go into homes of church members in El Millon and pray over them. One common pray request that stood out to me in our group was for the salvation of the husband/father. Very few of the men in the communities we ministered have given their lives to Christ often because "Christianity" is seen by men as something that is cowardly and something that the wife and kids should do but not the man.
The group that I was with went to the house of Estella to see if we could pray for her. She is the girl we have often mentioned that we found out went we arrived was demon-possessed. We had went and prayed over Estella during the first prayer walk we did in El Millon the day after we first arrived (Friday, the 15th). That first encounter with Estella left many of us on the team with a huge burden to see this 14 year old girl see free from the darkness we could so easily sense had taken control of her life. We were told that the people in the town were afraid of her. Her family and even her neighbors lived in constant fear of her as they had witnessed first hand demonic demonstrations taking place through her.
I and many of the team had strongly believed that the miraculous things we saw the Lord perform during our prayer time on Thursday morning had a lot to do with Estella. In fact, I sensed very strongly from the Lord that the spiritual battle we saw take place first hand that morning was a spiritual battle for the soul of Estella and that somehow supernaturally when we went to pray for Estella on Friday afternoon that the battle for her soul had was already won because of the work of intercession that had been done on her behalf on Thursday morning.
When we approached her home to see if we could pray for her she was already standing outside. Immediately she smiled and when asked how she was doing she said that she was doing good. Pastor Francisco's wife, Rosa, who was with our group and she said that she had never seen Estella so happy and peaceful before. You could tell just looking in her eyes that something was different. We anointed her with oil and prayed over her. Afterward, Rosa asked her if she'd like to go to church tonight. She said she would! After getting permission from her dad to come, Rosa made arrangements to pick up Estella for the church service that night. As we walked away from her house, we were all speechless. We didn't need to say anything. We knew what we had just witnessed was an act of God. We knew the Lord had done something supernaturally within this girl. Yet we also knew that she still needed to confess with her mouth that Jesus is Lord.
EVENING - I've never seen a group of students with so much faith and with so much confidence in the God they serve than I did last night as we headed into our final act of ministry on our trip to Mexico. But we also knew that Satan was going to do everything in his power to thwart the plans the Lord had in mind. We knew that Estella was coming. In the past when she had come to church, she had demonic outbursts that had terrified some of the people in the church. She had stopped coming because some of the church members had told her parents to not let her go any longer because people in the church we terrified of her. We also had been told by Francisco that there is a lady who attends the Friday night service who is also into Satanism. He said that she invites Satan into her home on the weekends (Friday, Saturday and Sunday) and has told him that the Enemy makes her feel better when he's present there in her home then when she comes to church. Also, we had invited a number of the non-believing men who we had built up relationships with through sports to the service on Friday night as well.
All these things put together left us with a great sense of urgency to pray knowing that so much was at stake. If this 14 year old girl who everyone in El Millon was terrified of would come to Christ and be transformed, everyone would have to know that there is a God. Not only did we know this and the Lord know this but we also knew that Satan knew this and would do everything within his power to stop this from happening. Yet we all went into the service with great expectations and with God dreams knowing that the God we serve can and would do the impossible!
The result was simply this - God did do the impossible! A number of students shared powerful testimonies, we shared our King of Hearts drama and we even led some worship. Dustin Eby preached and spoke so appropriately on this very topic - that the God we serve is a God that does the impossible. He spoke of David defeating Goliath, of the Lord using a small boy to feed 5,000 people and of the impossible that God did in his own life. Frankly, it was one of the most anointed, powerful, holy spirit filled messages I have ever heard given by anyone of any age. It was truly a "for such a time is this" moment.
At the close of the service, many people came to the altar for prayer, broken over the impossible situations that they were faced with in their own lives. Then Pastor Francisco gave an opportunity for anyone to receive Christ. Two individuals raised their hands. One of them was an adult sitting in the back of the room. The other was a teenager girl sitting in the front row. Her name, Estella, the previously demon-possessed girl that the Lord had literally gripped our entire team with a burden for from the very first day of the trip. We couldn't hardly believe it. God had already been so good to us. We knew we had been obedient and faithful to him. But to be able to witness the salvation of this teenage girl on the final night of our trip was almost too much to handle!
In a town that seemed like a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah (where it was common to hear among other things, of kids being raped by other kids, of children being raped and abused by men, of itch craft, of rampant drug use, of alcoholism, of Satanism), for salvation to come to the post-person of evil in the town, seemed like a spiritual victory that went far beyond just the salvation of one girl. Estella had represented for many in El Millon the depth and width of the evil that exists there. Maybe this is why she had gripped are hearts so much. We had heard of the evil that existed but to put a face with the evil that existed allowed our hearts to be broken for her and for the entire town of El Millon. What a glorious moment and a glorious night it was!
More to come... For now, please pray that as we begin debriefing here in the next hour and through tomorrow evening, that students will be able to see all that the Lord wanted to teach them on this trip and that they will be able to know what their next steps as they try to put this life-changing experience we've had in Mexico into context back home in Indiana.
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