The Spiritual Battle I Never Saw Coming
- Stephanie M.
- Sep 17
- 7 min read
I will never forget the day I leaned over to my mom during church and whispered, “I’m going to the other side of the world.”
We had been listening to our missions committee speak about an upcoming trip overseas, and the words flew out of my mouth so suddenly that I was left spinning.
No doubt it was the Holy Spirit moving in me, because I couldn’t stop myself from saying it. It just… came out. What really shocked me, though, was her response: “I knew you would be.”
Wait, what? No argument, no laugh, no questioning her 17-year-old daughter, who just said she wanted to hop a plane and leave the country.
Just, “Okay. We’ll make it happen.”
And happen, it did.
I Was Wildly Unprepared
The minimum age to embark on this trip was 18. I turned 18 a few months before we were supposed to leave so I was the youngest, least seasoned Christian on the team (that’s important for later).
We spent months prepping: fundraising, making travel arrangements, studying the culture, meeting as a team, and saturating the upcoming trip in hours of prayer.
Our leader briefed us on spiritual warfare, about how heavy the demonic oppression was in the area we’d be traveling to. We heard stories from other team members who’d been before, and they confirmed it was to be expected.
The accounts ranged in severity from lost luggage to being detained by local authorities and miraculously being released without them searching the team’s backpacks full of Bibles (which were illegal to have in the country we’d be going to).
Soon, we were prayed up, packed up, studied up, and ready to go.
I felt mostly confident, a little nervous, but completely excited to be heading off to share the gospel. I was ready.
Except… I was not.
3 flights and a 12-hour bus ride later, we were on the ground. The trip was mostly smooth (I’ll save that for another article), and we were linked up with our point of contact ready to talk about Jesus.
We’d already seen some incredible things happen, and one of our team members even led a local to Christ on the bus ride, so by the time we arrived we were on cloud nine thinking about all the Lord was going to do over the next couple of weeks.
Remember how I said I was the most unseasoned Christian on the trip? Well, it had me believing that I wasn’t a target. I believed that all the wild tales I’d heard from former team members wouldn’t happen on this trip because of how smoothly it was going.
My false sense of security left me totally unprepared to face what would happen.
The Night that Shook Me to My Core
Each of us on the team shared a hotel room with one of the other team members, and my roommate was one of my good friends who was just a few years older than me. She was, and is, a faithful Christian who loves the Lord, and I will forever treasure the conversations we had on that trip.
We ended one of our days making preparations to go up into the mountains the next day. We’d been in the city thus far, so it would be different in the villages. In the area we were working in, there was a night and day difference between city life and village life.
So stark was the difference, it almost felt like stepping into a completely different country as we ascended the mountain just outside the city, leaving the modern comforts of hotels and restaurants to find that some of the highest points didn’t even have electricity or running water.
We had finished our preparations and bags were packed for the early morning bus ride up the mountain. Excitedly, we drifted off to sleep thinking about what the mountains had in store for us.
At some point during the night, my roommate got up and went to the restroom. It woke me briefly, but I soon drifted back off. Shortly after, she got up again. This time, she was walking around the room, so I assumed she couldn’t sleep and was up looking for her Bible or something. Again, I drifted off.
The third time I was woken up, I felt the heaviness. I rolled onto my back and looked over to see my roommate fast asleep on her bed. So what had woken me up?
I wanted to get up, but my body couldn’t move. Completely paralyzed, I lay there, a cold sweat breaking out on my forehead. I felt a presence in the room, but was unable to move or do anything but stare up at the ceiling.
At the same time I felt the heaviness, I also experienced the warmest feeling of peace I’d ever felt. Though I couldn’t move, I knew in my spirit that it was a good thing. I felt like I was trapped inside a holy bubble, being shielded from the darkness in the room. I wasn’t scared; I was at peace. Soon, I drifted off one more time.
WHAM!
At 6 am, I sat straight up in bed and caught a glimpse of my roommate flinging the door open and running out of our room. I got up and followed her as she went next door to another of our team’s rooms, which her mom and our team leader were staying in.
As it turns out, she was violently sick, and we’d soon find out two of our other team members were too.
I asked my roommate if that’s why she’d been up so much during the night, to which she responded she’d never gotten out of her bed until she’d left the room. Confused, she informed me that she’d heard me all night long getting up and down and walking around the room. I hadn’t.
At this point, I had chills.
Neither of us had been out of bed. Neither of us had been walking around. The heaviness, the presence in the room? That was the enemy.
The four of us talked and were able to put more pieces of the puzzle together. We discovered that at least one of us had been awake just about all night long. Each time one of us were woken up, we prayed and went back to sleep. All night long, the wake-ups grew progressively more intense, and around the time I was feeling the heaviness, my roommate’s mom was praying over our room because she’d felt it too.
That explained the peaceful shielding I felt the night before.
As we reevaluated our day ahead, we decided to move forward with the plan, albeit with a smaller group. Of the 6 of us ladies, 3 were sick and stayed behind, while the other 3 of us went up to the villages for the day.
There weren’t any earth-shattering miracles that day. No salvations that we were able to witness. But we sure planted seeds. We spread the message of the gospel to anyone who would listen, in an area that was saturated with idol worship and unbelief.
We visited a couple of Buddhist temples, met with many wonderful people in the villages, and rode back down the mountain on a bus next to a man carrying a live chicken.
Most importantly, we accomplished what the Lord had sent us and equipped us that day to do.
What it all Means
Spiritual warfare is real and ever-present. What we experienced that night was a demonic attack, intended to stop us from what we were planning to do the next day. We could have cancelled the plan. We chose to follow the Lord instead.
I had never experienced that type of attack before. Thankfully, someone else was covering me in prayer at a time I was too immature in my faith to see it. No doubt there were others back home praying for us, too.
That night, I learned firsthand that we can’t walk through life with spiritual blinders on. We can’t pretend the enemy doesn’t exist. Our struggle is not against humans, but rather spiritual forces (Ephesians 6:12). That’s why it’s vital as Christians that we put on our spiritual armor — every single day (Ephesians 6:10–11). We have got to pray over everything (Philippians 4:6), and often (1 Thessalonians 5:17).
Spiritual attacks don’t always look like this one. In fact, I’ve not had one quite like that since. However, living in the Bible Belt, the enemy typically doesn’t need to go to such lengths to stop us from spreading the gospel. He simply has to make us busy, stir up drama in our churches or whisper a few lies to us about how we “deserve” to be treated so that we lash out when we are treated differently.
Oof, stepped on my own toes there…
I believe our attack overseas was so different because the above methods wouldn’t work there. He needed to use something stronger because we were little beacons of light headed into an area of heavy darkness. We were pointedly marching into enemy territory, and needed to be stopped — except we weren’t.
The Lord is more powerful than any fiery dart the enemy throws at us. He’s our refuge in times of trouble (Nahum 1:7). He is greater than any scheme of the evil one, which means we win in the end (1 John 4:4)!
Stay ready, friends. Pray always, and don’t be caught off guard like I was.
Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because you know that your brothers throughout the world are undergoing the same kind of sufferings (1 Peter 5:8–9).
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