Sleep, Peace, and Lions

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Psalm 4:8 King James Version

⁸ I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for Thou, Lord, only makest me dwell in safety.

 

I love the majestic English of the King James Version of the Bible, don’t you? I read Psalm 4 this morning, and it reminded me of an incident in our Tanzanian experience and also of Rose, our fearless leader, who assigned us the prompt: “Write about the blessings you have in your life.” During this NaNoWriMo month, I am trying to whip my Ikizu Memoirs into final or at least semi-final form. I am on chapter 53 of 58 planned chapters. Sylvia is my editor, and she recently sent me chapter 41 entitled Lion Encounter.

On Sunday night we were camping with our group in the UNESCO World Heritage Site, Serengeti National Park. In our tent we had our one-year-old daughter and the three Conway children, too. I awoke in the predawn to the sound of something dropping onto the roof of our tent. Deciding it must be a small branch from the tree we had pitched under, I turned over to go back to sleep. Suddenly, George’s shout: “Get out of here!” from the next tent, shocked me into action. Grabbing a flashlight, I jumped up and raced to the door of the tent, unzipped it, and shone the flashlight out into the darkness.

I stopped dead. Frozen. Not ten feet were the shining eyes of two lions staring back at me. There was nothing between me and two lions! They lay between me and the campfire. Time stretched out. The lions watched me but made no move. I remained still. Slowly, I swung the light of the flashlight in a wider arc. There were at least seven lions around our campfire, staring at me. Their eyes roved a bit to my right. There was George, clad only in his briefs, standing frozen in his doorway—and more lions.

I yelled to wake up the others in the group. Two teenagers sleeping in an old Land Rover looked out their windows. They started the Land Rover, and it backfired into action. All the noise was disturbing the lions’ tranquility. Slowly they got up and stretched. Regally, thirteen lions filed out of our campsite. There was no hurry, no obvious fear in their attitude, maybe only a bit of disgust.

No one got any more sleep. When daylight arrived and we got up to eat breakfast, on the roof of our tent we found two dusty lion footprints. Conversation centered around whether or not the lions were hungry. Two or three miles down the track towards the park headquarters in Seronera, we came upon our thirteen lions, busily polishing off two Thompson Gazelles. That ended the discussion about the lions’ lack of hunger.

This morning, my gratitude extends from not being devoured by lions then to an almost complete Ikizu Memoir now. Rejoice with me!

How grateful we are, Lord, that we can lie down and sleep because of the assurance that You make us dwell in safety.

 

 

 

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[1] https://www.instagram.com/elmarvn/p/CqPs67XKbTg/

Why Do the Wicked Prosper?

 

March 3, 2022

[1]

Psalm 73 Good News Translation

²  I had nearly lost confidence;
    my faith was almost gone
³ because I was jealous of the proud
    when I saw that things go well for the wicked. …

¹⁶ I tried to think this problem through,
    but it was too difficult for me
¹⁷     until I went into your Temple.
Then I understood what will happen to the wicked.

¹⁸ You will put them in slippery places
    and make them fall to destruction!
²⁸ But as for me, how wonderful to be near God,
    to find protection with the Sovereign Lord
    and to proclaim all that he has done!

 

During the late 1960s I taught at a rural boarding high school in Tanzania. The main support of the small village that had grown up near the school was poaching from the nearby Serengeti Game Reserve. Several villagers owned Land Rovers that they would use to drive out into the reserve at night and bring home animals that they sold for their meat and hides.

In order to avoid suspicion the Land Rover owners would strip the wheels, seats, and engine which would be kept by other villagers. They parked the stripped vehicles next to their homes. They were all old and showed no signs of having been used within the last several years. However, in the late afternoon a group of men would cluster around the vehicle. They would bring the missing parts and reassemble them. About five o’clock they would pull into the school gas station for gas. By the next morning they would have finished their hunting trip. The dusty vehicle would again be lying next to their home, wheels, seats, and engine all missing. It would appear to have not been used for a long time.

Several hunters would climb into the reassembled vehicle and drive out across a river that harbored both crocodiles and hippos. They were very careful to take a slightly different route each time so that no track appeared for rangers to follow them. They would mainly shoot large antelope, hack the carcass into liftable size pieces, and load them into the back of the landrover. When It was full they would head home and sell the meat to the villagers, including some of the staff of the school. Sometimes the Land Rover would break under the heavy load; then they would come on campus and seek me out to weld the break.

One of these poachers was much more prosperous than the others. His Land rover was practically new, a pretty green color. He dressed well, spoke passable English, and was much revered amongst all the villagers. We became friends. While he was making a delivery to one of the staff on campus late one night, I asked him if he had official permission to shoot the game. He smiled and assured me he did and produced an official looking requisition that had several animals listed on it.

One night he was out in the reserve loading the animals they had shot into his Land Rover when the rangers came upon him. Instead of jumping into the vehicle and fleeing like was usually done, he decided to have a shootout with them. During the fight he was killed. The rangers brought the vehicle back to the village with his body in it. The other hunters were carted off to jail. This time I saw his blood mingled with the blood of the animals. Of course, this did not put an end to the poaching.

There was a huge outdoor funeral for him. I joined hundreds of people who came to it, not only from that village, but many of the surrounding villages. Our school chaplain preached the sermon. He preached for several hours, while everyone stood or sat around patiently and listened. He covered the grand themes of Christianity in detail, including salvation, grace, the state of the dead, and the Sabbath. He told me later that he knew that this was the only time many of these people would hear the whole Gospel. He felt compelled to use the occasion to the best advantage for the Lord.

Oh Lord, thank You that You look after Your followers so well, even though we might not be as prosperous as the world’s tycoons. 

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[1] https://www.nrt-kenya.org/news-2/2020/11/5/10guardians-grevys-zebra-champion-stephen-lenantoiye

Serengeti National Park

 

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Psalm 104:24-25

King James Version

²⁴ O Lord, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches.

²⁵ So is this great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts.

 

We were poor. All of the other missionaries at Ikizu Secondary owned a car. We could not have afforded to put gas in it, even had we owned one. So, we had to hitch a ride anytime we wanted to go anywhere. From my meagre earnings I had managed to buy an SLR camera and a 200 to 400 mm zoom lens.

We lived on the northern edge of the great Serengeti National Park. Often on a Sabbath (Saturday) afternoon or a Sunday, I would talk with one of the other missionaries—never the Kings who had no sense of adventure—about what we might do. The only real entertainment within driving distance—the Serengeti.

I would almost always ride shotgun while Gary or Fritz or George or Dave or Bob drove. I seemed to have a sixth sense when it came to the trackless steppe county of Africa. Even though the grass was four feet high, and the bush and trees grew with no pattern, I always knew the most direct route to the only ford across the Grumeti River and the way home. There was no GPS in those days.

Upstream or downstream, the Grumeti housed the great crocodiles and even greater hippos. We would often risk life and limb by stealing on foot through the dense brush along the river to snap pictures of the crocs or hippos. Of course, this same thorn brush often hid the lions and leopards awaiting their prey. Hunters claimed you could always smell a lion from 20 feet away by the foul smell of rotting flesh caught between its teeth. I was fortunate not to have ever gotten that close on foot. Every year we got reports of someone’s having been carried off by a lion or disemboweled by a leopard.

Out on the plains we saw the great animals, 5-ton elephants flapping their ears to drive off the tsetse fly, tall giraffes delicately picking off the leaves from between the vicious thorns of flat-topped acacia trees. When we were lucky, we would arrive to experience the hundreds of thousands of wildebeest and zebra during their annual migration towards Lake Victoria. They left the plains totally denuded of grass and blotched with pungent manure. Then we could see the smaller animals: warthogs running with their tails pointing straight up, maybe the sneaky jackal. Always we saw various stately antelope that varied from the eland, as great as a bull moose, to the terrier-size tommy (Thompson’s gazelle) with its perpetual-motion tail. 

As the sun sank towards the lake in the west, we would drive back home, enriched by the vista of God’s varied handiwork. Back at Ikizu, missionaries gathered as Sylvia or Charlotte played hymns on the piano and we hand cranked vanilla ice-cream and popped corn, renewed for a new week of endless work.

Thanks, Lord, that we have never gone wanting and for the enjoyment we have received in spite of periods of poverty.

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[1] https://www.exploring-africa.com/en/tanzania/western-corridor-and-grumeti-reserve-western-serengeti/south-grumeti-river

Priceless Gift

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 2 Corinthians 9:15

Good News Translation

¹⁵ Let us thank God for His priceless gift!

 

When we lived in Tanzania, our boss’s boss made friends with those in high places in the national park administration. He let me know that we could go into the world-famous Serengeti National Park without paying. I had no paperwork proving this and never tried to use it when we entered the park at one of the standard entry points. But it was a priceless bit of knowledge.

There was no entry point near us, but the Ikizu villagers used to drive south across country and ford the Grumeti River and poach in the park. They were careful not to leave any tracks so that vengeful rangers could follow them and bring them to justice. The Grumeti sported hippos and crocodiles in many spots. It also had shallow spots where one could simply drive across in less than a hand’s breadth of water. These fords were not marked.

We had no car, but we could often talk some of our fellow missionaries into taking us on a spin out into the park on a Sabbath afternoon. I developed a sense of the veldt so that I could always guide us much the way I imagined the poachers used and find one of these fords easily. There were always many animals all over these vast Serengeti plains. We saw wildebeest, zebra, topi, and Thompson’s gazelle (tommy) every time we went. We often found ostrich and giraffe. Occasionally we would be favored with a small herd of elephant or one of the great African cats.

It was a cathartic to the stress that built up in our very confined missionary work. Some of our daughter’s first words were “g’af” and “tommy”. Once or twice, we encountered a ranger also out on the great plains. We would stop and exchange greetings. Since I had some knowledge of Swahili, I usually did most off the talking, and we always parted as friends.

On one occasion the ranger must have reported our presence in the park. One day two Land Rovers stopped in front of our house. I was out in the yard, and 8 or 10 uniformed men jumped out of the vehicles and surrounded me, their rifles pointing directly at my chest. I was totally astonished and wondered if this would be my last day on earth. The leading officer stepped up to me and demanded that I pay the entry fee for the previous time I had been in the park without paying.

The entry fee was only about ten shillings (about $1.50), and I was of a mind to pay up and call it quits. But I was very young and adventurous and started talking with the officer, using my best but somewhat broken Swahili. I mentioned my upper boss’s arrangement with national park’s headquarters in the capital, Dar es Salaam. I had no documentation, so my arguments were really worthless, and I was aware of that. We must have stood there in my front yard for well over a quarter of an hour; in those days in Africa people expected to talk about a proposal at length and to become friends in the process. The whole time we were talking those rifles were still aimed at my chest. Those holding them could follow the whole conversation because they all spoke Swahili much better than I.

In the end we came to a truce, and they all climbed back into their Land Rovers and left me. I was still in possession of my ten shillings, but much more importantly, I had the priceless right to go and come through the back entry of Serengeti with a free conscience.

In our part in the great controversy between Christ and Satan, the devil is always attempting to rob us of the priceless gift of God’s grace and eternal life. We have Christ’s eternal promise that no one can ever take it away from us by any force.

Thank You, Lord, for your priceless gift!

[1]  https://www.dreamstime.com/photos-images/soldiers-surrounded-soldier.html