Eve’s Daughter

The other night I was lying in bed listening to my youngest cough and cough and cough. He sounds like a smoker, and nobody smokes in our house. It was 2am and I’d just been up with him, changing his nappy and rubbing vicks onto his chest and his feet (recently heard that vicks on the feet then covered in socks somehow stops the coughing - I’m still not convinced though). I put him back in his cot and went back to bed and listened to him coughing. At first it wasn’t so bad, a cough here and there, not bad, but enough to keep me awake and listening.

Now before I go on I need to give a little history here. It’s only been recently, I mean very recently, that T and I have been made aware of just how real the devil is and how badly he wants to destroy us. Sad to say, until a few weeks ago, we fell into this category - ‘…Many believers live as though he [devil] doesn’t exist, having little understanding about the spiritual world’s ability to impinge on themselves or their families…’ p.16 from ‘Spiritual Protection for your Children’ by Neil T. Anderson and Pete & Sue Vander Hook.

I mean we’ve always known the devil and demons existed and they were very real, but we’ve lived as though this wasn’t the case, as though that sort of stuff only happened to the “super spiritual” - to the missionaries, pastors, evangelists etc., you know, the people out there on the front line. What we’ve been discovering over the last year, over the last few months and especially over the last few weeks, is that this is just sooooooo far from the truth. I guess it’s just another of the devil’s lies; the lies he’s been feeding us to keep us from the truth and to keep us from being effective and dangerous Christians, the way God created us.

Anyway, one area where our family has been repeatedly attacked, again and again and again, is in our health, especially in the last year. Mostly it’s the kids and T who have been copping the health attacks, my health issues have only been mild in comparison. In the last year we’ve had K in hospital with pneumonia, various gastro bugs, ear infections, chest infections, eye infections, coughs and colds, chicken pox, miagranes, hypoglycemia, dramatic weight loss, sore throats, T with lots of classic chronic fatigue syndrome symptoms (no medical professional has suggested that he might have it, but he’s got heaps of the symptoms - anyway, that’s another post in itself) etc, etc.

This was at its worst from August through to the start of November 2006 where we rarely went for more than 5 days before somebody was sick with something - it was very tiring and disheartening. And interestingly enough, it started about a week after T and I had both stepped into the new life that God had shown us (more of that in another post), but it’s only now, as we read all this stuff, that we are understanding that we were under attack as the devil tried to steal our hope and our joy. Unfortunately, to some degree, he succeeded, he wore us down and we became very frustrated and disheartened and I got to the point where I screamed at God, inbetween sobs, in the middle of the night, “if this is what it means to be a Christian, then I don’t know that I want to be one!”

I calmed down after that and knew, that despite how I was feeling I could never turn my back on God - I know the truth, there’s just no way I could pretend otherwise. And that was a turning point. Since then it’s been a bit of a slow haul getting back “on top of things”, and getting back to that “new life” stage, however in the last 6 weeks, it’s really accelerated and things are steaming ahead, despite the adversity we seem to be constantly facing.

As I’ve said it seems to be fairly consistant that these attacks are mainly on our health and it is often our kids who suffer. They get sick at other times too, but it’s fairly consistant for them to get sick one or two days before something big is happening that both T and I are involved in. Which inevitably means that only one of us can go. At the moment, our youngest has a really nasty cough which gets worse at night (he hardly coughs at all during the day). One night when he just wasn’t settling and we’d done all the stuff except tilt his mattress up, T asked God, “what else?” And the immediate thought that came to him was, “cast out demons”!

At the moment, I am finding this whole concept quite, I dunno, quite “out there”, unsettling, bizarre, embarrassing even - I mean, I’m just speaking to the air, there’s no-one there and I feel ’stupid’, not a feeling I like. I’m embarrassed that I’m doing it, and most of the time I’m the only one who can hear it (T feels the same way too). Anyway, T went back into his room and began praying, casting out demons and spirits in Jesus’ name. The coughing stopped. Ten minutes later it started again. He prayed again. It stopped. This happened three or four times. I know it’s bizarre and looking at it in the ‘cold hard light of day’, it’s just me being silly, yet, at the time, I knew it; I knew this was an attack.

So this is the next night and I’m lying in bed listening to him cough and I have this thought, ‘I wish T was awake so he could cast out demons because I don’t think I can do it, I’m not ready for it’. I almost let this thought pass through into the ether of the mind. I mean it’s 2am. I’m not exactly thinking clearly. However, something “twanged” within me and suddenly I was thinking very clearly. I said out loud (in a whisper because T is asleep beside me), “That’s a lie! I’m not accepting that!” I guess, this is what it means to ‘take every thought captive’. I also reminded myself, ‘I’m wearing the armour. I’ve got the helmet of salvation on, my mind is protected. I am protected. And God already has the victory.’

So then I started to pray; I began casting out demons - I still felt like a fool. T’s asleep, he can’t hear me, yet I was embarrassed, but it didn’t stop me praying. As I prayed the coughing get worse and worse and worse. The more I prayed the worse it got and I thought I was going to have to get up and do something. Then I began claiming the promises of healing once more, quoting the scriptures (as best I can remember). The coughing continues. I began praising God, thanking him for healing X, thanking him that the cough is gone, telling God that he is wonderful, awesome, fantastic… The coughing eases off and stops and I fall asleep.

What an amazing journey we are on and what a totally awesome God we have!!!

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