Machine Guns and Sleeping Ghosts
The rickety old bus climbed to 14,000 feet above sea level on a dirt road; we were in the Andes Mountains of Bolivia.
As the bus reached the top of the mountain, I marveled at God’s creation. It was like being on top of the world.
But then I began to fear for our safety as the old bus began to chug down the mountain rapidly. Glancing out the window, I was looking at the edge of the road with thousand-foot or more drop-offs, no guardrails, and a crazy driver at the wheel. This was the Pan American Highway, but it was much more like a back road cut in the side of the mountain.
When we entered a mountain village, the bus suddenly stopped. I saw Quechua Indian ladies in their native dress selling fruit and bread. They were trying to get our attention by shouting out in Spanish the items they had for sale.
The mountain air was crisp—a welcome relief from the hot and humid climate in the lowlands, where we had been for two weeks—but the dust and thin air had me gasping for breath. In a moment I was gasping for another reason: Suddenly, out of nowhere, uniformed military men with machine guns surrounded the bus!
Two weeks before, our son, Chuck, fifteen, had contracted typhoid fever at the mission school where we worked. We were afraid he was going to die, since we had no way to get him to the city hospital eight hours away. Torrential rains fell all over Bolivia, making it impossible for the mission plane to reach the school. Since many roads and bridges had been washed away, we couldn’t reach the city by land either.
A few days later the rains began to let up, but the mission radio couldn’t make contact with mission headquarters in the city. Thankfully, we had a ham radio and were able to request help. A plane was finally sent to our aid.
After two weeks of treatment in a city hospital, my son was released and we were returning to the school in a bus that looked a hundred years old. My son, sitting next to me, was still weak and looking frail after losing nearly thirty pounds.
I was concerned the trip would cause him to relapse if all didn’t go well. The conditions of the roads and the buses made me wonder if we could ever travel in Bolivia without encountering problems. Often there were landslides and roadblocks, and more often than not, mechanical problems with the buses.
We were traveling in a small, dilapidated bus much like a school bus; people were carrying their chickens and pigs to sell in the marketplace, and the driver seemed to be in a race with other bus drivers to see who could go the fastest over dangerous roads. Needless to say, all of this was not exactly helpful for a teenage passenger recovering from a life-threatening disease.
And now we faced another problem: the military was detaining the bus to search for drugs and check our IDs.
It was our first year in Bolivia and everything was still new and strange to us. This trip was the first time I had traveled without my whole family by my side—my husband and daughter were waiting for us back at the mission school. So I was feeling anything but calm when the armed military soldiers entered the bus.
My son was relaxed beside me, but he didn’t realize we didn’t have any form of identification with us. Our passports were in the capital city of La Paz to process our permanent visas, and we were left without anything else to identify us. Normally, people with no proof of permission to be in the country were immediately arrested and taken to the nearest prison, especially foreigners.
Prison in an underdeveloped country is not a place anyone wants to experience; just a few weeks before, I had visited one of them. I went with a group of missionary ladies to visit a young American lady who’d been arrested as she was leaving the country with cocaine in her possession.
The prison trip was shocking for me, a new missionary. In the prison, the smells were horrific and the living conditions appalling. Her cell had only a concrete floor with no bathroom or bed, and she had nothing but the clothes on her back. Her only meals were what people from the outside brought to her.
The lady had no one to help her, so a ministry began as we took food, clothes, and God’s Word to her each day, meeting her needs in every way we could. She came to know the Lord and began witnessing to the other prisoners, a ministry within a ministry. Eventually, she was extradited to the United States and left Bolivia a new creation in Christ.
That prison scene was now on my mind. What would happen when they discovered we had no identification to show them? Would they take us to prison?
I told my son the problem we faced and announced that the only thing we could do was pray. I said, “Put your head down, close your eyes, and pretend you are sleeping. Don’t open your eyes unless they insist. We are going to pray they don’t see us.”
My son looked at me as though I had lost my mind, but I assured him God would take care of us.
I glanced down the aisle once more and saw at least ten soldiers with their machine guns. That didn’t give me much peace in my heart. I prayed that God would put a hedge around us and that we would be overlooked.
Even as I prayed, I knew I was asking the impossible. How could they miss two tall blondes with white skin in a bus filled with short people who had black hair and dark skin?
One by one people on the bus were checked—their luggage, their bodies, and their possessions. We could hear the baggage being taken out of the compartment under the bus. Every inch of the bus was being searched.
We kept our heads down and our eyes shut.
We were in the middle of the bus and, as they came down the aisle, I could hear their questions. They spoke with authority; it was intimidating to a foreigner in a strange land.
They came closer. The people sitting in front of us were asked to step into the aisle and were searched. The baggage over our heads was taken down, searched, and returned to the compartment.
My heart was racing and I couldn’t tell if my son was breathing, he was so quiet.
I opened one eye just enough to glimpse the soldier’s boots moving to the seat behind us. We kept our composure and kept our eyes shut. They were moving past us.
The soldier’s machine gun bumped my head as he passed, but he didn’t ask us to step out. Didn’t he know he had hit my head with his machine gun? Was I just a sleeping ghost to him?
It was as though we were frozen in time; we were like statues with our eyes shut until they passed. And even then we didn’t move.
Hours seemed to pass until they reached the back of the bus, finished their search, walked back through the bus, and then exited out the front doors.
“Are you okay?” I whispered to my son. “Stay still until the bus leaves.”
In moments, the engine roared, the bus jerked, and we were on our way.
What had just happened?
We thanked God for answered prayer. It was as though we were two ghosts, invisible in those two seats in the bus. Had God sent His angels to encompass us? Had He made us invisible? Were the soldiers blinded to our existence?
We only knew He had intervened in a supernatural way. He had protected us from any harm and perhaps even rescued us from the pit of a Bolivian prison—where my son could never have survived if we had been detained for any length of time. It was a miraculous rescue from unknown dangers.
When our bus finally turned off the bumpy road into the mission school, we couldn’t wait to exit that bus and tell of God’s miraculous protection.
Does God still do miracles today? Does He do things that seem impossible to us but possible with Him? Does He answer our prayers?
You bet He does.
Psalm 4:8 says, “In peace I will lie down and sleep, for you alone, Lord, make me dwell in safety.”
That verse came to me that day as my son and I pretended to sleep. I felt peace knowing that He alone keeps us safe—sleeping or awake, with or without machine guns passing by our heads, and even while pretending to sleep.