I helped out as a leader on a Christian youth camp over the past four days. It was fun. However, the campsite was one I'd been on before (called wambiri, which means "meeting place"), and the instant I stepped out of the car, my head involuntarily snapped towards a certain tree.

A little background.

A few years ago I was on a camp at that same campsite, walking from one building to another. As I looked across the oval that this tree is on, I saw a body hanged off the tree - not quite child-size, not quite adult. As I keep walking around the oval, the body very clearly moved with the tree against the background, and then after maybe 20-30 seconds, I blinked and it disappeared. The year after that camp though, one of the leaders who had always been a big wigged out by that tree too took a look (independently and unknowingly of my tree-corpse experience) and found a noose hidden up the tree. The leadership team for that camp decided to pray over the noose, and apparently it started writhing and doing weird things, so they burned it.

I should also point out that this tree has numerous burn marks for where they tried to burn it down, and it just didn't want to.

Anywho, back to this weekend's camp.

I wandered over to the tree... and it was almost electrical with energy, it was insane. The one thing I did pick up though, was a sense of impending attack (that the tree felt one was coming), so instead I decided to pray for it, and tell it to rest. Oddly enough, the tree started to calm down.

Did that a few times over the weekend, and the most trouble anyone got from that area of the campsite was some sand in their eye.

However, after talking to the leader who'd found the noose on the previous camp, I discovered an odd stance. Christians seem to be very aggressive to "things that are not of God" - spirit-wise, anyway. But if such a strategy doesn't work on people (and is in fact, the complete opposite of how Jesus told us to act), why should it work on spirits? And my mind, in that moment, went back to Legion - the myriad of demons possessing one man. They recognised who Jesus was, and asked him not to just turf them out into the darkness, and Jesus asked them where they'd like to go. They replied that there was a herd of pigs nearby, and Jesus agreed and sent them into the pigs.