Spiritual Warfare on the Road

               Well I can say I didn’t think I’d be writing this post so soon in… BUT….

                So on the NET Irish Road Team spiritual warfare comes in many ways. Sometimes it comes in us feeling down. Sometimes it comes in a difficult retreat. But this week, it has come in quite a few van troubles. So when we were driving from Cavan to Kerry, the clutch in our van decided to break and we were stranded right outside of Athlone for a short amount of time. At first we just stopped and our Team Leaders (who are amazing) got out, talked, and tried to get the van to work. We all prayed our rosaries, prayed over the van, splashed the van with holy water, but nothing. Thankfully, one of the NET Board Members was close by and he helped us get our van serviced. We still had to leave 3 team members back while the other 7 drove on to Kenmare for the next retreat.

Us unloading our van. We looked great on the side of the road.

               A little shaken from both hunger and the idea of leaving a portion of our team behind, 7 of us packed backpacks with basic stuff we needed for the next day and piled into our little black galaxy, which for those of us who do not know what brand that is it’s almost like a mini-van, and began the rest of our 3 hour drive.

                But wait… there’s more….

                We made it to Limerick where we were able to have a delicious KFC Dinner (Lucy’s favorite), but as we kept driving the check engine light came on. We were instructed whenever it came on to just pull over and stop the vehicle, reset, and then keep driving. We did that, but the engine light came on maybe fifteen minutes later. So we pulled over again. And again. Eventually it decided not to reset and the check engine light was consistently on. We were all a bit on edge and wondering if God even wanted us at this retreat.

                Rest assured he did.

                It was a very difficult retreat, but Jesus was working wonders. Some students said that their lives were changed. Overall, we all felt that we had a very effective prayer ministry. Which is very interesting because I felt about the opposite of the rest of my team. For me it was a very difficult retreat and I was not sure it made a difference, and that is hard to deal with when we’re all so tired and traveled all night to reach a destination.

                The thing I learned from that experience is that Satan does not want us to be here. He does not want us to put on these retreats, and if we have to fine but he wants each one to discourage us. He wants to bring us down. He wants to bring us down because what we’re doing is so incredibly important. We are bringing youth to Christ. Every single soul we are able to show Jesus to at the retreats is important, even if it is one singular soul. In the case of this team, spiritual warfare might look from anything as simple to car troubles to even individual team members feeling anxious about something. I can assure you that all of the above have happened.

                Again, thanks for reading. I think the honeymoon stage of our journey is over, so please keep all of us in your prayers!!

We all had a night out in Kenmare. PS: This is my team y'all!

              PS: I'm just going to have another quick update because I wrote this post about 2 weeks ago and it's just now getting published. Missionary life!! But thus far we've been traveling for two and a half weeks and have done retreats almost every week day. It's been incredible just to see the lives touched and it's only the beginning! Please continue to pray for us, and I'll write more about this in the future.