There's a war going on out there...

Well, despite all the emails sitting in my inbox, papers to be graded sitting on my desk, and students at my door waiting to play Wii, tennis, badminton, pool, ping pong, etc., I’m taking a moment to write something here. It’s been too long anyway.

I want to write something that is possibly controversial for some of you, but I think it’s important. It’s about warfare. But not man vs. man. It’s of the spirit nature. Now, I don’t know where all of you stand on this issue, but I wish you could be personally privy to some of the things I have experienced here, so that you might better understand what is at work against us (and against all of us – even in America). Let me briefly recount to you some of the things that have happened here.

Several nights I have been awakened by 1) a terrible feeling of fear and heaviness all around me, 2) a sensation of being strangled by an invisible source, or 3) strange noises moving around our building that did not obviously come from anything I know that exists around our building.

One night I went to bed and saw 4 pairs of green eyes staring at me from my ceiling. I rebuked them, but in the morning, there were still 2 pairs of eyes remaining. Another night, I went to sleep peacefully, but when I awoke the next morning, I saw a face in my ceiling staring down at me. When I noticed it, it bared its teeth at me and then disappeared.

Once when there were a few of us (brothers and sisters) together, we were walking across campus, and we noticed a snake slithering along the ground. We stopped for a moment because it surprised us all. It stopped too, looked up at us for a moment, and then went along its way again. I asked my students, and they said they have never seen or heard of there being any snakes on our campus.

Recently, I decided, for a strange set of reasons, to show the movie “The Exorcism of Emily Rose” to my students. If you have seen the movie, you know that at 3am, lots of strange things happen. Well, the night before I was to show the movie, both Rick and I were awakened right at about 3am. I had, thankfully, put up my new mosquito net that night, but still I was awakened by the sound of mosquitoes at my ear. I thought this seemed strange. So I unzipped my net, turned on the light, zipped the net again, and I was really frightened to see mosquitoes all around my net, trying their best to break into the small holes. Thankfully they were unsuccessful, but I was still very unsettled. The next morning all the mosquitoes had gone, and I check all my windows and doors to find that they were sealed. Rick, on the other hand, was awakened by a bad nightmare that left him feeling disoriented, in pain, and a bit in fear. I had not told Rick that I would be showing the movie, so he was very surprised to hear this story.

This week I also showed to the movie to my other class of students. I wanted to find a Chinese version of the movie because some of the students from last week complained that it was difficult to follow all of the big English words in there. I had seen the movie at a store downtown before, so I went to find it. Alas, it was sold out. I went to 3 other stores with a student looking for it. Two of them did not have it. At the last store, we told them the name of the movie, and they said they had it, but when they looked for it, it was gone. Strange timing for it to be sold out everywhere, since this is not exactly a blockbuster movie here in China...

And most recently, Rick, my teaching partner, has found out that he has a bunch of kidney stones in him, including one rather large one that doesn’t want to pass. The doctors say he is okay, but he needs to get some treatment done to break up the stones. If he does this now, he will be out for a full week of class. If he waits, he can finish class, but he has to endure the pain until he can get treatment. We’re not sure yet how we want to address this, but we could certainly use your prayers.

Now, are all of these signs of warfare? Maybe, maybe not. But, nonetheless, it awakens us to the reality that we are not “home” yet. We are living in a fallen world that is passing away. And it makes us realize we have a job to do here. I hope you all back in America can be encouraged to do your part, too! The harvest is here – let’s claim the fruits of the labors of the past and the labors of the present!