True Story
"I
need help," said the voice on the phone. It was Kristin, a
21-year-old Midwestern farm girl now serving as a missionary in China.
"Why, what's going on?" I asked.
Kristin paused, then replied in a resigned voice, "I just spent four days trying to cast a demon out of myself, but I can't get it out."
Kristin was young but blessed with exceptional faith and drive to serve Christ. A few days after arriving in her small, rural Chinese town, which was her first time in Asia, she had called and sounded down while sharing that she seemed to be the only foreigner in town, whose street signs were only in Chinese, and the only other English-speaker she had met was the manager of the kindergarten that had hired her to teach English to children. Having served in China, I had advised her to consider resigning, which she could do since she had paid her own airfare, relocate to Beijing or Shanghai, which are much more Westerner-friendly and have more job options for vocational missionaries, get acclimated to China, learn some Chinese, and then move to a small town, if desired. She had remained silent and then called back a few days later and excitedly shared that she finally had found a Three Self Church at the outskirts of her town. In it was a dilapidated classroom that hadn't been used in years, perhaps decades. She said she was going to fix it up, replace its broken windows and eventually teach the Bible to Chinese women and children in it.
A few weeks later, she had emailed and asked for prayer but not replied when asked for what she needed prayer. In the days that followed, she had repeated her request for prayer without being specific other than mentioning once that she was "under attack." She was now disclosing the nature of the attack.
When I asked her how a demon had gotten inside of her, she replied that the children's bathrooms in the kindergarten, above which she was housed, was filthy, so she had bought some cleaning supplies and was cleaning them by herself one night, when she felt a presence behind her and turned around to find a demonic figure coming in through the closed windows toward her, and had fainted. When she regained consciousness, she was lying on the bathroom floor and felt the demon inside of her.
She had tried to cast the demon out of herself but couldn't, so she had traveled to the nearest city that had an International Christian Fellowship and sought help, but hadn't receive it. So she had locked herself in a cheap motel room and had gone to battle for four days and nights trying to cast the demon out of herself. She sounded exhausted.
I wasn't surprised that the International Christian Fellowship hadn't helped her, as most large Chinese cities have them but those that I had visited while in China had been little more than social clubs for the expats in town. And I already knew that she had no one to turn to in China or back in the States, as she didn't have a sending church, and her pagan parents had disowned her when she became a Christian.
I still had no idea how a demon could enter a Christian, let alone a missionary, but Kristin was now Jesus' wounded lamb. I had no experience casting out a demon, but in the Bible, Jesus' disciples cast out demons in His name. So Kristin and I prayed, and then I commanded the demon over the phone in Jesus' name to come out of her. For the next hour and a half or so, the demon shrieked through the phone, repeatedly crying out in a hoarse voice that was deeper than and different from Kristin's, "I don't want to leave!