“Bill?” Bill Swan was standing in the entryway of the hostel. He looked up when I called his name. “I’m your next one-on-one.”
“Yeah, sure,” he said. “Would you mind if we walk while we talk? I have to get a key from Pappy before I leave in the morning.”
I shrugged. It was getting kinda late, but the apartment Mama C and Pappy were renting wasn’t far. “Sure,” I said. “Why not.”
“Great. Give me—” Bill held up a finger. “Give me just a minute.” With that, he walked away.
Bill Swan is the Director of Field Leadership for Adventures in Missions. He doesn’t typically attend World Race debriefs, but the Lord convicted him to go to ours in Granada, Nicaragua. He didn’t know why at first, but it later came to his attention that several people had been experiencing a lot of spiritual warfare.
I was one of those people. After my deliverance in Costa Rica, toward the last half of July, I came under spiritual attack more than once. These attacks got increasingly worse, and by the time we arrived in Nicaragua, I had to take a half-day off from ministry for fasting and prayer.
After Bill heard some of these reports, he decided to give a talk on spiritual warfare. That’s why I wanted to do my one-one-one with him—he’s got experience in this area, and I knew I could talk to him about my deliverance.
As I stood at the entryway, waiting for Bill to return, my squad mate Casey approached. “Hey, Kay. What are you up to?”
“Waiting on Bill Swan.” I grinned. “One-on-one.”
“Mmm.” Casey nodded thoughtfully. “Are you going to have it out here?”
“No, he said something about needing a key from Pappy. We’re supposed to talk when we go get it. But it’s—” I looked past Casey. “It’s getting kinda late, and I’m not sure where he went.”
No sooner had I spoken the words than Bill appeared. Praise God. It was 10:45 pm when I’d first told him I was his next one-on-one. It was probably closer to 11:00 by now.
“Okay, well, have fun.” Casey waved, then started toward the inner courtyard. Bill was fast approaching—but then I noticed Casey hesitate up ahead. He paused, did a one-eighty.
Bill came to a stop in the entryway. One of my other squad mates cornered him just as I was about to ask if he was ready to go.
I blew out a sigh. One-on-ones are only thirty minutes, and mine was getting cut shorter and shorter.
“Hey, Kay?” Casey was once again standing in front of me, his expression quizzical.
“Yeah?”
“Would you care if I joined y’all?”
I raised an eyebrow. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have cared. But this wasn’t a normal circumstance.
“Listen, I—I would normally love if you came, Casey”—I chose my words carefully—“but, well, I’m actually going to be talking to Bill about my deliverance. Some of that’s private.”
Casey nodded, as if to say he understood, but his expression said otherwise. His forehead was creased in confusion, his eyebrows knit together tightly.
A moment of silence passed between us. Then he said, “I felt led to come back over here and ask you that.”
“Um…” I glanced back at Bill. He was still talking to that squad member. “Casey, we shouldn’t be long. You can’t just wait till we get back before you talk to him?”
Casey studied the wall behind me, eyes pensive. “It’s something about going with both of you.”
Wow, he wasn’t usually this persistent. I wondered what was going on in his head.
Bill didn’t have a problem with Casey joining us, and I guess I didn’t either. As soon as Bill was ready, the three of us trekked down the front steps and made our way through the backstreets of Granada on our way to Mama C and Pappy’s. The roads were narrow and poorly lit, but I wasn’t scared. We’d done our team debrief at the rental, and it really wasn’t very far—literally just a few streets over.
On the way there, I talked to Bill about my deliverance, asking him about issues that had arisen afterward. Casey didn’t say a word the whole time. He just stayed a step behind us, trying to give us as much privacy as possible.
A few minutes into our discussion, we came to the rental. The lights were out.
“Pappy!” Bill knocked before reaching through the bars of the front gate. He was trying to get a grip on the front door—which, oddly, was a sliding door. He fumbled, trying to slide it open. “Pappy!”
“Pappy?” I helped Bill with the door. “Mama C?”
“Pappy!”
After about five minutes, Pappy came ambling into the living room. He rubbed the back of his head, eyes puffy. Bill told him why we were there.
“I don’t have the key.” Pappy yawned and shook his head. “Greg has it.”
Bill looked shocked. “He does? Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. I don’t have it, brother.”
So that was that. Pappy went back to bed, and we headed back to the hostel, confused and keyless. As we turned a corner, I knew I better get to my main question quick, otherwise it might not get answered. Bill had another one-on-one after me, and he was leaving to go back to Gainesville early the next morning.
It was now or never.
“So, uhh—Sam didn’t identify every stronghold I had,” I told Bill as we walked. “He asked each leader how many were under its authority, but he didn’t go through the names of all of them.”
“That’s fine. That’s how I would have done it.”
“Oh?”
“You don’t need to know the identity of each one. Just deal with the leaders, then bind them and cast them out as one group.”
“That’s what Sam did. And he was able to identify some, but—I don’t know, it seems like there were a lot.”
Bill shrugged as he led us up the street. “Demons like to puff themselves up during deliverance, trying to intimidate the person. They could have been lying about how many were in each group.”
“Have you ever met anyone who had a lot?”
Another shrug. “I met someone who had fifteen and didn’t even realize he had a problem. So…it’s possible you could have had a lot. Their power was broken when….”
He kept talking, but none of it was registering. My attention was fixed on the street ahead. Two men had marched up to a homeless person sleeping on the sidewalk. They grabbed the homeless guy by the collar and yanked him up. I heard the change in his pocket jingle as he abruptly sat up.
I slowed, falling several steps behind Bill and Casey. One of the perpetrators was manhandling the homeless man, shoving a hand in his pocket—
He’s getting robbed! After the realization hit, I suddenly remembered our homeless friend Juan and the change we’d given him earlier that night.
That’s not Juan, I said to myself. No way.
I watched as the one man jerked the homeless guy around. He reared back, about to slug him. I opened my mouth to say something. Nothing would come out.
“Hey!” The homeless man jumped to his feet. “Hey, wait!”
Bill, Casey, and I stopped dead in our tracks. The guy was talking to us and immediately made his way our direction. As he stepped under the light of a streetlamp, I recognized him. It was Juan. Or, I thought it was. He had a buzz-cut like Juan, and his feet—
My jaw slid out of place. His feet were bare.
My eyes darted across the street, to the opposite sidewalk. There, sitting right where Juan had been sleeping, were my old running shoes. He needed those shoes; though, I couldn’t blame him for leaving them behind. The two men who’d attacked him were scary, especially the one who’d raised his fist. His expression was cold, calculating. I could sense evil swirling all around him.
But Juan couldn’t just walk around barefoot. Pointing, I called out: “Juan, your shoes!”
Juan was walking briskly, head turned. The two men were coming after him. When I called out to him, he paused, gaze abruptly landing on me. “She knows my name.” He glanced at his assailants. “She— She knows my name.”
“Juan, where are your shoes?” Casey asked.
“They know my name!” Juan seemed dumbfounded, literally dumfounded, that Casey and I remembered him.
That’s so sad when you think about it. God is SO BIG, and yet He knows Juan’s name. He knows everything about Juan. But that’s a foreign concept to many homeless people. Homeless people are often surprised when you ask for their name because they’re so frequently overlooked and brushed aside.
Letting people know they’re human, that they have a soul, is just one way to share God’s love. That’s all Casey and I had done when we called Juan by name.
Juan crossed the street and made his way over to us. His assailants did the same, matching his movements like lions stalking their prey. One of the guys gritted his teeth and pointed at Juan. I’m gonna get you, his expression screamed.
I thought for a moment that maybe they would give up and take off now that we were in the mix. We were tourists. Maybe they wouldn’t want that kind of trouble.
That didn’t seem to deter them at all. In fact, they looked even more determined, and now Bill, Casey, and I were standing between them and their target. Suddenly it occurred to me—what if they had guns? Or knives?
Fear began to rise in my bones, filtering into stomach, then my throat. These men weren’t the kind of people you mess with, and we were on a dark street in a foreign country with no police around.
Jesus, protect us.
You’d think in a critical moment like that I would’ve prayed a better prayer. Not the case, apparently. That Jesus, protect us was honestly the best I could come up with. But it was in that moment that an epiphany slammed into me.
I’d heard a Graham Cooke sermon just a few months prior where Graham was talking about standing on God’s promises and walking in the identity God has for us. The example he used was David and Goliath. When David faced the Philistine giant, he knew he was going to be victorious. He wasn’t going to die. He’d just been anointed by Samuel to be king! God wasn’t going let something happen that would keep that reality from coming to fruition.
So when David stepped out on that battlefield, he did so knowing exactly who he was to God and who God said he would be. He was walking in full understanding of who God is (faithful and true) and what his own identity was (the future king of Israel).
Like David, I, too, have received a prophecy from the Lord. The prophecy is that I’m going to be a wife and a mother. God spoke it, and it already exists on some spiritual plane. I’ve seen glimpses of it, heard details spoken of it. But like David, that reality hasn’t yet come to fruition.
I’m going to be a mom, I thought as I stood before the two assailants. That was the epiphany, and I knew I wasn’t going to die. Not that night.
Then, almost like an afterthought, I realized, God’s not going to let them touch me. He’s with me right now. I’m protected.
I honestly don’t know how I came to this conclusion. The men could have hurt me without killing me, and I could still go on to be a wife and mother. But somehow I knew, I just knew, they couldn’t touch me, as if I could sense God’s hand upon me.
My fear fell away. Chin up, I marched right past the two assailants, over to where my old shoes were lying. I’m not sure what Casey and Bill were doing when I crossed the street. They may or may not have called after me. I really couldn’t say because I was so focused on the task at hand.
After snatching up the shoes, I marched back to the gathering on the opposite sidewalk. Bill and Casey were now standing between the assailants and Juan. As I came up behind them, I started binding demons. “Violence, I bind you in the name of Jesus. Murder, I bind you in the name of Jesus.”
Pure confusion melted the main guy’s icy expression. He stared at me.
Then, the most interesting thing happened—the main guy’s companion left. He just spun around and walked off, turning a corner and then heading up another street. The main guy watched him go before his puzzled stare returned to me.
“Harm, I bind you in the name of Jesus. Demons that make this man hurt people, I bind you in the name of Jesus.”
The man’s expression went from puzzled to completely blank. And there we stood, on a dimly lit street, in Granada, Nicaragua, in the middle of the night, staring at each other until Bill chimed in. “Here’s what’s gonna happen,” he said with authority.
The guy broke his gaze from me and turned to face him.
“You’re gonna go that way with your buddy”—Bill pointed—“and we’re gonna go this way. All right? All right.”
The guy didn’t argue. He didn’t point another finger at Juan or even raise an eyebrow. As if being led on a leash, he simply did as Bill said and walked in the same direction as the first guy.
Juan came with us to the hostel, though he ultimately ended up staying the night on the streets. I was pretty torn up about it, fearful for his safety, so Casey stayed up and prayed with me for a while. We prayed that God would hide Juan the rest of the night, that He would station angels around him and protect him.
We also prayed for God to lift him out of the tumultuous life he was living and to send other Christians to help him….and wouldn’t you know, the very next day a group of Racers came across Juan on their way to church. My squad mate Isaiah shared the Gospel with him once again (this time while Juan was sober), and somehow they got Juan connected with a man named Mario. He was a local in Granada, and a former addict himself. He agreed to help Juan, giving him a place to shower and offering to feed him. He also encouraged him to stop drinking.
It was such a blessing to hear all of this the following afternoon. I know God answers prayers, but seeing Him work so quickly really put my mind at ease about Juan’s safety.
I feel confident Juan is on the right track, but any and all prayers would still be very much appreciated. I truly want him to experience freedom and a joyful, abundant life in Christ Jesus. I declare that’s going to be a reality for him through the power of prayer and the Lord Jesus in whom we place our hope. Amen.
Many, many thanks to all my readers who take these prayer requests to heart. It means the world to me that you care about the poor and oppressed, all those souls who’ve stolen my heart and touched my life on this mission.
Oh, the joys of those who are kind to the poor! The LORD rescues them when they are in trouble. The LORD protects them and keeps them alive. He gives them prosperity in the land and rescues them from their enemies. The LORD nurses them when they are sick and restores them to health. Psalm 41:1-3
