The Light Shines in the Darkness

I sat at a table where my teammates, Sarah and Grace, were sharing the Gospel, next to a girl named Ice. Our Thai friends at that table were talking about the "ghosts" or "spirits". I asked, "Oh, are you afraid of them?"

"Yes!" They exclaimed. "Very much."

"What is it like?"

"It is very uncomfortable when they attack you." They said, "But Ice, she can sense them much more. Sometimes we will feel uncomfortable, and she will scream because she can see them." I looked at the girl next to me who seemed very troubled. 

My teammate Grace said, "Sometimes Aiden can sense ghosts, too." (We are referring to demons when we say "ghost" or "spirit").

Ice looked at me when Grace said this, and urgently asked, "Wait--what is your name?" We talked for just a moment before joining back into the big conversation. 

There is a traditional Thai house on campus that felt very dark and heavy as we were walking through it a few days before. Now the Thai girls were talking about how it is haunted by spirits. "We felt that the other day," I told them.

Ice looked at me urgently again, as if to say "I feel it, too." I asked, "What do you do when you feel the spirits?"

"We pray!"

"And then do the spirits leave?"

"No!" They said, "When we pray, the ghosts come to get us." My heart shattered. 

We shared with them that, for Christians, when we feel the “ghosts” coming we can pray to Jesus. God is more powerful than the demons & when demons see the light of Jesus they have to run away. 

"Wow. I wish the Thai people could be protected by a God like you have." 

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it - John 1:5

We are meeting with these girls again as soon as possible; they want to learn more Bible stories. 

Please pray for Ice, Popcorn, and Baby to truly understand that they can have a relationship with God like we have. 

Pray for them to understand that God, the Creator of the universe, is more powerful than any demon.

When sharing stories of Jesus with these girls, they said they had heard it before. "We were taught that it ended here," they said, pointing to a picture of Jesus on the cross. Oh, how they lit up when we told them that was not the end of the story! We have a God who could not be held by death. We have a God who died, for our sake, then rose again. 

-Aiden Grace

University Pioneer Team

Bangkok, Thailand