For the past few weeks I have mentioned that my wife Jean and I have visited or lived in several foreign countries. Before we move on to a different topic, let me share some of our favorite stories from our life overseas.
Snakes live everywhere. There are even snakes in Oklahoma, but there are many more kinds—some dangerous, some not—in other places. The first time Jean and I visited our family in Australia, we were nervous about snakes. We had heard a few frightening stories of their encounters with snakes, but they had reassured us that we would be safe inside their house. Their house consisted of a ground floor which was storage, and the second floor where they lived. They had remodeled the ground floor to create a guest bedroom and bathroom for us. On our very first night there we were upstairs eating and visiting with them, but as I needed to use the bathroom I went downstairs to the guest bathroom. There on the wall behind the toilet was a long snake curled up and looking at me. I took a photo, then ran upstairs and called my son-inlaw. He came down with me, but the snake was gone. A thorough search of the first floor did not find the snake, so our son-in-law said he thought we would be fine to sleep down there. His reassurance was not good enough for my wife! She said that there was no way she was going to sleep in a room where a snake might be hiding. She insisted that we swap bedrooms: we sleep upstairs and our daughter and son-in-law sleep downstairs. After a brief argument my wife prevailed. For the rest of our visit we slept upstairs, and they slept in the guestroom. And that snake never came back— From the photo we identified it as a non-poisonous kind of snake. (that photo is attached) A more perilous snake story happened in Liberia, Africa. Jean was hanging wet laundry on the clothesline in our backyard. She didn’t see the snake on the ground until she stepped on it. In retrospect, we think it was a mamba- a very dangerous snake. Jean had evidently stepped on its neck because the remainder of its body wrapped around her leg up to her thigh (she was wearing a skirt). She screamed and shook her leg. The snake didn’t come off, so she shook her leg again and the snake dropped onto the ground and slithered away. Jean ran in the opposite direction. She came inside, woke me from my nap, and sent me out to kill the snake, but fortunately for me the snake was gone. I suppose the snake had returned to its home where it told its family “You’ll never believe what just happened to me!”
Jean took a very long shower, trying to wash the feel of the snake off her leg. Later that afternoon, as she was telling the story to our neighbor, I pulled a prank: I snuck up behind Jean and rubbed a stick up the back of her leg where the snake had been. She screamed again. She has often jokingly said that my prank brought us as close to divorce as we have ever been! My bad.
There have been other stories with even greater danger. The most traumatic incident had nothing to do with snakes. Jean was at our home in Monrovia, Liberia, preparing for a literacy lesson she would be teaching. Only our youngest daughter Heidi, about two years old, was with her. A robber came into the house through the unlocked front door. He came up behind Jean and put a knife to her neck. She screamed and reached up and knocked the knife away. He ran. She grabbed the two-way radio, took Heidi outside, screamed for help, and radioed the missions compound where I was at work. A friend drove me to our house, making it in record time. Jean was not seriously hurt physically— she had cuts on her fingers and a bloody scratch on her neck—but she was traumatized. That day we moved into a different house.
I do not want to scare people away from traveling or working overseas. These kinds of incidents are rare. During our nine years in Liberia, no foreigners were killed by assault or snakebite. Three died in a plane crash but that was an accident. There are dangers anywhere you live, but we used to say we felt safer over there than here. At least in Liberia there were no school shootings!
One thing we learned through all those adventures is that God is faithful— we are both still alive and well today—the safest place for any of us is in his will. Bad things can and do happen to all of us wherever we live. And we learned that prayer matters. On the morning that the robber attacked Jean, in Illinois her mother awoke in the middle of the night (at the exact same time) with a sense that she needed to pray for Jean. She prayed and Jean was delivered. For any of us anywhere, prayer matters! That is the real moral of those stories: we should pray for missionaries, and pray for each other.