Dark tendrils of mist reached through the cracks in the bamboo walls toward Ramon as he sat alone in his empty hut. A gloomy dusk was rapidly settling on the village, but there was no cooking fire to bring warmth and light to the little hut. The village, usually alive with the sounds of children chasing chickens and parents pounding rice was eerily silent.

As Ramon sat in the shadowy room trying to trace the source of his uneasy feeling, he heard a rattling behind him. Quickly turning, he saw a hand slowly raising a piece of roofing tin that served as a makeshift widow shutter. Ramon’s eyes were riveted on the hand. The piece of tin rose higher and higher, and then a face slowly appeared behind it. Ramon recognized the face immediately. He had seen it in the missionaries’ picture rolls. He had seen it in the Bible story books they had taught the children from. He had seen it in the felt sets they had used to tell Bible stories every Sabbath. It was a face calculated to strike fear in the heart, dark and lined from millennia of hatred and warfare against the God Ramon loved so much. It was the face of the enemy.

Pure hatred seemed to burn into Ramon as Satan stared directly at him. The look in his eyes said that he would like nothing better than to grab Ramon by the neck and slowly strangle the life out of him. And yet, Ramon felt no fear. A calm peace seemed to encircle his heart, giving him assurance that no matter how miserable the enemy could make his life, he could not touch the apple of God’s eye.

Waking with a start in the grey pre-dawn, Ramon spun around to look at the window. Nothing. It had been a dream. And still the calming peace enfolded his heart. God was with him.

Two weeks later, on a Sabbath afternoon, Ramon and another church leader named Standing, who has been Ramon’s constant companion in our work with the Batangan, sat with me on the porch of my house. Dong, our Batangan guide, was with us, and we were negotiating the details of the upcoming expedition into Batangan territory I wrote about last month. Even at this point, it was apparent that this was going to be a hard trip. As we mapped out the Batangan territory, decided where we wanted to target, Standing and Dong became very discouraged. They began talking of backing out of the Batangan Project completely. As Ramon continued to talk to the men, I prayed silently and fervently that God would not let His work suffer such a significant setback at this critical time. For half an hour, the two men wavered, but as the setting sun turned the air around us a vivid orange, both Standing and Dong agreed to continue with the expedition.

Dong would head back to Batangan territory early the next morning, so as soon as the meeting was over, a friend and I hopped on my motorcycle and headed out to buy supplies at the little dry goods store about a mile from our base village. The trail back into the village skirts a four-foot drop-off where the river has washed away part of a field. On our way home, as we came to this section of the trail, without warning and for no apparent reason, the motorcycle veered off the trail and pitched over the small cliff. My friend and I were thrown off the bike, and the supplies we had bought went flying across the dry river bed. As we picked ourselves up, we found that neither of us had a scratch on us. Inspecting the motorcycle, we found that it, too, seemed untouched, without even a dent or a nick in the paint. Praising God, we pushed the motorcycle back up to the trail and continued back to the village.

I had just finished delivering the supplies to Dong when I heard a voice at the door. “John, please come and bring medicine! Ramon’s wife has been poisoned!”

A few minutes before, about the same time as my motorcycle mysteriously pitched off the trail, Ramon’s wife, Dulion, had set a pot full of bananas on the fire to boil for supper. As she rearranged the fire wood in the falling dusk, she heard a noise behind their house. It was a strange sound like angry, guttural panting, and a shiver ran through her. “It must be some kids,” she mumbled to herself, trying to shrug off the sudden chill in the air. “Stop making that racket or you’re going to scare someone!” she called, pushing back the piece of tin that hung across the window and looking out. No one was there.

Puzzled, but not thinking too much of it, Dulion turned back to the fire. As the piece of tin slammed back across the window—the same window that Ramon had seen in his dream two weeks earlier—a sudden wave of nausea hit her. Her head seemed to spin like a top, and she collapsed on their sleeping mat.

As soon as I heard, I raced across the village, dodging sleeping goats and startling chickens roosting in the eaves of houses. Bounding up the ladder, I found almost the entire village crammed into the little house to express their sympathy and offer help. As Ramon started mixing the activated charcoal I had brought, we began comparing notes and assessing Dulion. She didn’t know about Ramon’s dream, so she hadn’t yet made the connection or told us about the strange noise, but it was clear to us that something strange was afoot. Dulion had eaten nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that everyone in the house hadn’t also eaten. As I assessed her, she seemed completely normal. In the back of my mind, the events of the evening started adding up. First, Standing and Dong had become so discouraged that they had almost backed out of the Batangan project. Immediately after, my motorcycle mysteriously veered off the trail into the riverbed. As I arrived back in the village, Ramon’s wife suddenly fell ill, yet we could find absolutely nothing wrong with her.

“Ramon, has anyone prayed for Dulion?” I asked.

“No, not yet,” he replied. “Would you?”

“Father,” I prayed. “The enemy is very angry, and he is trying to destroy Your work. This evening, he has systematically, and in rapid succession, targeted each person involved with the Batangan Project. Father, Your work must not suffer loss. I pray that You would bind Satan now, and whether this sickness is a result of poisoning or a direct attack from Satan, I ask that You would touch Dulion and bring healing in accordance with Your will. In Jesus’ name I ask, Amen.”

As I finished praying, Dulion felt a change. She was not instantly healed, but she immediately felt better, and within a few hours she was completely well.

Two days later, the expedition to the Batangan began as planned.

Our enemy is very real, and he is fighting very hard to keep God’s lost sheep in slavery. However, that evening seems to have been a turning point. Since then, we have made slow but steady progress toward obtaining permission to move into Batangan territory.

Our God reigns. His angels guard us, and His peace accompanies us. He will not be defeated.

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