This is from one of our World Racers - Ian Schumann - Please continue to cover these guys and prayer and watch them come alive!

The Opening Volley

Posted in General by Ian Schumann on 10/20/2008

For our two teams down here in Mindanao, life this month has been fairly easy, given the givens. But on Friday the 17th, we had our eyes opened.

It started the day before. A Transformers girl, Alex, got a stomach bug and a mean fever--mean enough to bail on dinner and crash at the campsite. The caretakers on our teams stepped in to care for Alex that evening. Symptoms matched a 24-hour virus thing that we'd seen already, and so the prescription was rest, water, observation and some medication.

Things were rough in the girls' room that night. The crux of the night, sometime in the wee hours, had Alex collapsed and shaking on the bathroom floor, surrounded by teammates who boldly prayed her through a climax of fear, disorientation, and panic. The fever had not been just a fever.

The following day, over dinner, Alex and her teammates told us the whole story. What's nuts is that Alex had had many nasty fevers before, been sick and achy and even hospitalized plenty of times to recognize the signs, to take care of herself. But these signs weren't recognizable, and she was helpless. This enemy was as much spiritual as biological. It was constriction. Suffocation. Oppression. It was panic.

As the full depth of the truth was hitting us, our Australian missionary friend Ami suddenly couldn't breathe. This was inexplicable, out of nowhere! If it were possible to miss the full import of Alex's story, now there could be no doubt. This thing was real, and it was happening right then.

 We rushed to Ami's side and prayed against whatever the heck was happening. People stepped up like we hadn't seen before. Gifts were released, roles revealed. We learned a lot about each other in that time. We stayed for half an hour praying, singing, edifying Ami, rebuking the enemy in our midst. We came out of that time bonded, galvanized, and awakened to the threat around us. The 13 of us slept in the same room, rotating 2-by-2 in shifts of covering prayer throughout the night.

That's the story.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how Gary Black was scary. I've now seen that, in large part, Gary was just trying to prepare us, to wake us up to the reality of what we were walking into. This mission is not just building shelter, teaching minds, edifying hearts--we are at work in a spiritual battleground. We're breaking bondage, healing soul wounds, establishing little patches of Kingdom wherever we go. We are inadvertently inviting attack. And on Friday, it came.

I warned you this might come. Friends, sorry if this is weird. I can read too, and my words look like sketchy Christianese nonsense. I'm aware of how I sound, and I understand your skepticism, even your concern that me and my teammates are being misled.