Fencing Ministry at a Girl's Refuge Center

This past Thursday, I was given a wonderful opportunity to bring fencing to war-torn Juarez, Mexico. I was involved in leading a mission team from Arkansas and Thursday, we went to one of their favorite places, a girl's refuge center, where girls as young as 9 are pulled off the streets, bad home situations, and worse. They live in a lock-down facility that protects them from the dangers of the streets and even themselves, but they are taught the love of Jesus and this team has been visiting them several times a year for six years. God laid on my heart to speak to the girls, using fencing to illustrate my points.

I used three fencing actions to illustrate life lessons with a spiritual warfare theme. The first is a very powerful move and demonstrates how our enemy, Satan, tries to get our attention focused on one area in our lives, when his real target is somewhere else. The second is a real quick attack that is designed to look like an arrow, and it resembles the fiery darts that the enemy throws at us. The third was my main one, which is a counter-attack that also evades the attack. I used this to illustrate forgiveness and that when we forgive, the intended blow misses entirely and the enemy falls on the Sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God, without any chance to recover. In this I used a sparing partner with no experience, and emphasized that he could not have done the actions he did unless I showed him how. The same is true with forgiveness. We know how to forgive because God forgave us first.

This presentation had a huge impact on the team and the girls. I had at least 5 people come up to me saying they learned something deep and profound from it that they never knew in years of thier faith. Not a single person had anything to say about it they didn't like and God showed up in style through me. I sought to get it video recorded, but the guy operating my camera didn't realize it wasn't recording, but his son got at least part of it before he ran out of memory. He is going to see who else had cameras rolling and get me as much of a complete recording as he can. When that comes in, I will post it here. God is so good and he's got much more than this planned for me.