Nose to nose with a black mamba
Sometime back in the late ‘80’s after a day at a lake in southwest Missouri, my friend Betsy and I found a local diner to eat some home-style cooking. As we enjoyed the plates of country goodness set before us, we couldn’t help but overhear snatches of conversation from a nearby table. It seemed our fellow diners were believers discussing miraculous exploits and supernatural interventions.
We paid our bill and commented to the owner about the small group. He told us that they were members of the “End Time Handmaidens” organization and that one of the men at the table had been their guest speaker. This man was also the owner’s personal friend; would we like to meet him?
Of course we would! As the others in the party paid their bills and left, Betsy and I were introduced to the gentleman, Phil Cooper, a missionary to Africa. He didn’t need much urging to share about the event we had heard bits and pieces of while we ate our dinner at an adjacent table—he, his wife, their one-and-a-half year old daughter, another couple, and two single ladies had been abducted from their remote mission by soldiers of the Mozambique National Resistance army in May of 1987.
It was closing time in the diner. Phil had just started telling us his story. The owner needed to clean up, but was happy to let us stay and drink coffee and talk as long as we wanted. As he locked the door and put up the “We are closed” sign, Betsy, Phil, and I settled back at the table for a conversation about God’s miraculous protection long into the night.
The divine intervention that most captured my interest and imagination had to do with a harrowing experience that Phil, his wife Vikki, and their toddler Abi experienced one afternoon. The missionaries had been trekking for months from outpost to outpost with their guerilla escort through the jungles of Mozambique, pausing only briefly to rest, eat meager rations, and to “bathe” in portable grass huts by pouring a pan of water on their bodies.
It was when Phil, Vikki, and Abi were in the grass bathing-hut that God showed up to deliver them—just in the nick of time.
Phil told it this way: He was standing closest to the doorway of the hut, rinsing himself off. Out of nowhere, in through the opening, vertically and at top speed, whipped a seven-foot black mamba. It stopped short and reared up, nose to nose with Phil. Despite the fact that the mamba is Africa’s most aggressive—and deadliest—snake, the family simply froze, too startled to be afraid. And then, as quickly as it entered, it left, zipping out through the thatched wall only to be shot and killed by the leader of the captors.
After they were rescued and safely back home, Phil and Vikki began to share about all the miracles attending their abduction and three-month forced trek through the jungle.
One woman, upon hearing the details of the mamba encounter, asked Phil to tell her the day it happened. As they compared notes, she wept. “I was sleeping and the Lord awakened me so forcefully that I almost fell out of bed. ‘Phil’s in trouble!’ the Lord told me. I knelt beside the bed and prayed like never before with a deep sense of urgency, and then—just as suddenly—the burden lifted. Now I know why!”
Betsy and I listened in amazement to this godly man’s testimony of deliverance and victory, knowing that our “chance” selection of that little diner was nothing short of a divine appointment.
And as I reflect upon the black mamba tale, I’d like to address three perspectives.
- When you are nose-to-nose with danger: God—and God alone—can orchestrate your deliverance. And because He is faithful, He will. “But the Lord stood with me and strengthened me, so that through me the proclamation might be fully accomplished, and that all the Gentiles might hear; and I was rescued out of the lion’s mouth. The Lord will rescue me from every evil deed, and will bring me safely to His heavenly kingdom; to Him be the glory forever and ever. Amen” (2 Timothy 4:17-18).
- When you are “knocked out of bed” with an urgency to pray: You have just been chosen to be a key player in God’s deliverance of someone else. Pray! Yield to the urgency and pray with the Spirit and your understanding. God picked you for this assignment because He knows you are capable of following through. So follow through! Someone is counting on Him to orchestrate their deliverance—and you have become part of that process! Trust Him on behalf of the one He so dramatically placed on your heart—and He will show himself strong. “Faithful is He who calls you, and He also will bring it to pass” (1 Thessalonians 5:24).
- Concerning the devil: Realize that no matter how big, how fast, or how venomous he is, victory always belongs to the Lord, and the devil is defeated. “But thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumph in Christ, and manifests through us the sweet aroma of the knowledge of Him in every place” (2 Corinthians 2:14). “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet” (Romans 16:20).
May you always walk in the triumph prepared for you in Christ!
Dorothy