Ethiopia & Sudan Part III

Sorry for the delay. I had to work out a bug with my aol subsribers. Now, two more Ethiopia stories, then I have a summary of Sudan to share. I've wrestled a bit with this next story for fear it's more interesting and unusual than spiritual. But the reality is that this shows exactly how real the spiritual realm is that we move about every day.

On my first day working in Dire (Deer-Ray), Ethiopia we stopped for lunch. The landscape was generally open. I worked in a farming community and spent a good deal of time walking through fields and talking with farmers. As we sat down on the edge of one of these fields it began to rain. Seeing a house about 300 yards away, Hymie, the disciple maker I worked with, saw the lady who owned the house and the next thing I knew we were heading to her home.

The landscape in Dire.

Stopping to eat lunch.
Why I thought we were in an Orthodox home, Hymie pointing.

In front of her home she had a bull and a few goats, inside her small "compound" she had her main house and a small mud and thatch hut. She directed us into the hut. At first I thought we'd stumbled into an Ethiopian Orthodox home because the hut had pictures of Jesus in an Orthodox style. The woman was very friendly towards us and when a lady on my team brought out her camera, both this woman and her son quickly ran to change clothes. The wanted their "formal wear" for the photos.


Her main house in the background.
The boy on her hip is the reason for her invitation to us. He was an orphan and her motive was not kindness for us, but money or to give the child to us. Obviously these are all "before" pics.

With everyone in the hut, I handed my EvangeCube to Hymie and asked him to share the gospel while we waited out the rain. Suddenly, I looked back at him as this normally soft-spoken man barked a few sentences commandingly out at this woman. Before I could register why in the world he acted like that, it was if I found myself in a Hollywood movie set. The woman began to convulse, shake and yell/babbly incoherent gibberish. Then she ran out of the hut and into the main house.
Hymie about to share Christ with her.

Hymie slowly followed her and as he passed me, he turned and said, "She has an evil spirit in her."

I have never encountered anything like this before. I took our translator and the other American with me and we immediately began to pray for her and Hymie. He stood on her front porch and talked with her for a few minutes then came back to the hut. The rain had mostly passed and he told me we needed to leave.

Hymie and I stopped back in her yard by the livestock and I asked him a few questions. My heart was beating a little fast and I was still processing what I just saw. I asked him if he'd encountered this before. Oh yes, many times he replied. Then I asked him why we couldn't command the spirit to leave the woman. I learned something from his reply. He said there had to be some inkling of desire within her heart to have Jesus enter and to want the spirit to leave. She had neither. There appeared to be at least three spirits living among her. They told her they'd kill her if she disobeyed them, and she made money selling prophecies they gave her for her neighbors. She made a clear choice that day to remain in bondage to those spirits. She told Hymie that they were why she had us go to the hut instead of the main house. At least one lived in the main house and because we had the Holy Spirit in us, he directed her to put us away from him. (No I don't understand all that was going on.)

Then Hymie pointed to a black bull standing nearby and said a spirit lived in the bull as well. I was a bit incredulous and asked him how he knew. He said, "She told me."

As we walked up the road from her home, my translator asked me if I encountered people like this and evil spirits very often in America. He asked because this was relatively common in this part of Ethiopia, and in many parts of Africa. I told him that if I went looking, I could find it but that it is extremely rare for a spirit to manifest itself in the U.S. The Enemy uses other means of distraction with us: primarily idols of materialism.