God Has a Car Waiting

This is a story of Geoffrey Bull, a missionary years ago to North Borneo.

One morning Peter came in weeping bitterly and pointed to his shoe. I pulled it off quickly and saw that one of his little toes was bleeding. As I was looking at it a yellow spider-like creature crawled from the shoe and slithered away into a crevice of the back stairs.

It was one of those sickening moments when you hardly know what to do for the thought of what the incident might involve. My mind went back to Australia where we lived once, for a year, and I thought of the fatal funnel spiders and ‘red backs’. I recalled reading in a Sydney newspaper of an 80 m.p.h. car dash for serum with a child suffering from a spider bite. Eighteen minutes from bite to injection and the child’s life was saved.

Were the spiders like that in Borneo? I had no idea. What was it that had bitten him anyway? I could not tell. Quickly I picked him up in my arms, rushed him out of the front door and stepped straight into a friend’s car, which happened to be parked there that particular morning.

I drove at once to the hospital and walked rather unceremoniously into the doctor’s consulting room. The crowds of native folk waiting must have wondered whatever the disheveled Englishman, clutching a dirty little boy, was wanting that morning. The doctor did not laugh at me but immediately gave Peter two injections and applied a dressing.  As I drove home I could glimpse his little form hunched without movement on the back seat. Once indoors again, we put him down quietly on the bed. He was very subdued and lay still for a long time but after some hours he began to improve rapidly and all was well. What a miracle of God that a car had been outside! It was the only morning since our arrival it had been there.

God knew all about what was going to happen, He had worked in the circumstances of life to have a car waiting just when it was needed.

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