I like to post lighter stories about the jungle and our friends who live there but the reality of missionary work is that it can be very heavy and intense on a spiritual level. This short post touches on that reality,
When heading out to an area basically untouched by the Gospel of Jesus Christ it wasn’t unusual to experience a literal gut wrenching feeling in the pit of your stomach. In a place where through ignorance, lack of truth and especially lack of spiritual truth Satan has held people hostage for centuries the spiritual darkness is so thick you can almost cut it with a knife. The longer Satan has held people in spiritual darkness the more deranged and dysfunctional people in a real life sense become. The more and longer the absence of truth the more skewed a people’s world view becomes. Part of the way Satan controls people is by enforcing and reinforcing such a twisted and grotesque world view. When heading out to confront such deep spiritual darkness a co-worker and myself occasionally had to stop and be sick into the river over the side of the dugout we were traveling in.
To be sure we were headed for dangerous rapids to navigate, other rapids we had to pull our boat through and a waterfall we had to pull our canoe over and around. But the physical dangers and obstacles we faced were not the problem. In fact if it weren’t for the spiritual aspect, the trip of several months would have been a high adventure camping trip. It is that feeling in the pit of your stomach tends to take the umph right out of you. To begin with the jungle people you’ll be living with exist in a state of perpetual fear. A fear so real to the jungle people it hangs like a dark unseen cloud over the head of every man, woman and child in the village.
The reality of death is so much on the minds of the people they refuse to talk about death or dying of a friend or family member. If circumstances forces them to address the subject they will communicate in whispers. They see themselves as living in a very hostile world vulnerable to death brought about by sickness, enemy arrows, snake bite, harmful magic, malevolent spirits, enemy shamans and the list goers on. Even in the case of sickness or snake bite the jungle grapevine will usually bring to light the the nefarious activity of a ‘human’ enemy shaman. In any given village shamans work night and day to keep their people safe and to wreak havoc on the enemy. Everybody knows the enemy shamans are out there chanting, probing, sending their spirits to take advantage of any weakness, One can never let their guard down. It’s kind of like a spiritual cyber attack, incessant, malignant and deadly. Even the shaman has to be careful because his friendly spirits can turn on him with deadly results.
To these jungle peoples for someone to have died a “natural death” is almost an unknown. A death in the case of a very young baby or a very old person may not be blamed on another person but there’s always an element of suspicion.
Do these folks not have lighter side, do they not laugh and have a good time occasionally? Yes they do, but it is the ever present challenge of how to survive in their very hostile world that drives their decisions on where to make their villages, do their gardens and how to live life. Jesus Christ, “the Way the Truth and the Life” is the only path out of their spiritual darkness into spiritual life and the resetting of a correct word view in their minds. Satan will fight tooth and nail to prevent this from happening including working overtime to discourage missionaries.
If you know any missionaries please PRAY, PRAY and PRAY some more for them. Oh and by the way the jungle referred to here could just as easily be a city somewhere where missionaries are facing the same spiritual conflict, the same spiritism, the same shamanism, the same opposition, which may not be as visible but don’t doubt that it is very much there. Again if you know any missionaries please PRAY, PRAY and PRAY some more for them.
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