Not only do I believe and agree with this definition,
but this past month and a half I have experienced it, full on.
Let me explain briefly.
I have 3 months to cultivate a team of ministry partners who will partner with me financially and prayerfully so I can be hired by Cru to work on campus with them for this next year.
This entails spending May 1st-August 1st networking, meeting with people, calling people, gaining referrals so that I can reach my goal.
Which roughly looks like having $3000 monthly and some one time support as well.
Longstory short, Satan has done whatever he can to trip me up in this process. I just wanted to share how ridiculous this journey has been, not to gain pity but more to rub it in Satan's face and glorify the Lord because He has been and will always be bigger than petty attacks.
May-Upon returning home from training, my medicine which I've been taking for 4 years stops working. I have epilepsy, and a very uncommon type. I never have seizures, but do to a birth defect I was born with, the same birth defect that caused me to have 3 craniofacial/plastic surgeries, the inactive neurons in my brain started to misfire. I have taken a low dosage of medication for a long time, but in May I started to have horrible side effects-I got extremely depressed, anxiety, lost my train of thought, lost my short term memory, couldn't articulate thoughts randomly, couldn't control some of the things I said and everything made me cry.
So I changed medications, which worked well for a week, and then I had a severe allergic reaction. My mouth burst out in canker sores, my lymphnodes in my neck swelled, my whole face swelled, my lips were so swollen I couldn't close my mouth and I had vertigo. It was lovely. I ended up having to take time off work...and I could not talk to people, meet with them, go on appointments...basically there was no way to raise support. My month of May=Gone.
June-To top off my face looking like a blimp, my doctors were not convinced that these symptoms were due to my new medication so I had to continue the meds until I saw signs of a deadly rash known as "Stevens-Johnson Syndrome". If you google it, you will cringe. The second Saturday in June, I woke up with the rash, that spread across my body in a few hours...and finally they were convinced to let me stop this medication. So we started a new one, yay!
I could now start support raising. I have my entire computer backed up on my external hardrive, just to be safe. To keep all of my 100+ contacts together, with their addresses, phone numbers, calendar dates, support status, etc...I had to download a database. So I did, saved it to my desktop, along with the contact list that I had on my external hardrive. I thought that putting my contacts on my desktop would be so much easier than carrying my external everywhere. :) Oh irony. As soon as getting all of my contacts loaded and scheduling appointments, my hardrive on my laptop DIES. Literally, just stops! I quickly took it to my computer guy to look at. He did everything he could, and nothing. I was left with absolutely nothing. No database, no contacts, literally nothing. So for the next two weeks, I contacted the people I had in my phone and made due, waiting for my new laptop to arrive. On a whim, I had my hardrive looked at again, and it received the same diagnosis...dead. But I left it over the weekend, and just prayed for God's help in this. I didn't know what to do. I lost two weeks of work. But GOD IS SO GOOD. I received a call late Sunday evening from the computer guy explaining that my hardrive for some reason just turned on, randomly, and he had just enough time to save one folder...the one with all of my contacts!!! God was so gracious in that but my June=Gone.
July-I will fill you in on my next post. But know this, God is bigger, greater, and more capable of everything I expected him to be. Satan has spiritual warfare up his sleeve, but Jesus is the ALMIGHTY...no one can beat that.
