Halfway between Tete and Joburg was Harare, Zimbabwe, a shining city on a hill surrounded by seven mountains and filled with beautiful buildings and spacious avenues. Jacarandas and flame trees scattered the streets with flower petals. The people were friendly. The racial tension that kept you edgy in South Africa was absent in Zimbabwe. Harare was our Shangri-La, just three hours from the heat and dust of Tete. We had fallen into a good thing. Suffer for Jesus in Tete and then once a month escape to Harare for shopping, fine dining and comfortable furniture. Again let me repeat, Zimbabweans are really nice. They’re friendly. Their English is lilting and intelligible (unlike the mumbling Bantu-mangled English of Malawi where everyone speaks nonsense). Harare was a so-called “white man’s Africa,” high elevation, malaria-free, green grass and flowers everywhere, and thoroughly westernized. We passed the days in Harare visiting vegetarian cafes, and Italian bakeries, and even a place that made hand-dipped Belgian chocolate.

Traveling south to north through Zimbabwe you cruise through dry but beautiful scenery. The mountains are enormous domes like overgrown pebbles. The highway is straight and smooth. Donkeys, always in pairs, graze along the shoulder. We often stopped at the Golden Spiderweb, an idyllic spot halfway between the border and Harare for tea and cream scones served on china with lace everything from curtains to table mats.

We were never very regimental travelers. Itineraries were always something to discover as you went rather than map out in advance. So on this visit to Harare we sailed into town with a vague idea of staying in a Baptist guesthouse somewhere in George. I remember feasting on pastries and aromatic coffee at the Italian bakery. Sitting on the marble steps outside while the children jumped and chased and banged into tables. As we cruised through town in the afternoon, pale pink light filtered through the lines of trees on the avenue. On the radio, Rod Stewart was singing, “Have I told you lately that I love you,” and my heart swelled with love for my family and that feeling of really having stumbled into a good thing. George was some suburb out by the airport so we wandered around a bit trying to find it. The sun was setting when we arrived at the gate. Or we thought it was the gate. Nothing was very clearly marked. Maybe these were covert Baptists and their guesthouse was strictly on a need to know basis. We tried several of the big gates, banging on them, honking the really macho Land Rover horn, and calming the kids who all needed to pee after indulging at the Italian bakery. Finally, one of the gates opened up and let us in. The place was deserted and quiet. As we piled out of the car and started to unload, Henry and Ellie started climbing a tree and Andrew just sort of toddled around. A young guy walked up to me and flashed a toy gun at me. I smiled in that half-dumb way that Americans have when confronted with foreigners acting weird. Only it wasn’t a toy. Pretty soon two guys were pointing guns at us while another two waited like hyena’s at a lion’s feast. With the car half-unpacked, bags all over the place, kids toddling around, it was just a bad time to get robbed. The kids needed baths. We were headed into Mozambique the next day to begin our blessed ministry of Bible translation. Being held up by nervous punks with guns was wrong, all wrong. I was doing the non-confrontational thing. No problem. Take what you want. Try to avoid eye contact. Hilary started going all cowboy on me. The punks had grabbed her bag and she wanted our passports back. Finally I had to shout at my own wife to lie down and stop looking at these guys. I remember Henry going over and lying down next to his Mom. Even during a violent crime, kids are so dang cute. I told the guy with the gun in my face to hold on because I had some cash. I reached behind the front seat and pulled out an envelope with more than a thousand dollars in cash. He took one look at that and they were heading out of there fast. The leader told me to come along and I kind of dragged my feet so he gave me a half-hearted punch in the jaw and I pretended to fall down and they all ran off, jumped into a little white car and were gone. The punch didn’t hurt. Honest. I’m a really tough guy despite my gentle appearance. I was always getting punched in grade school for no good reason and I don’t remember the punches to my head having any effect.

Hilary was really mad. Probably crying. “Those guys were scared to death. Couldn’t you see the gun shaking in their hands. And they took our passports and DIREs.” (A DIRE is a Mozambican residence permit) My more immediate concern was that they had taken both sets of car keys and buttons for the immobilizer. So now we’re stuck at the scene of the crime with a dead Land Rover, no paperwork, and three kids that thought the whole thing was some sort of big make-believe. Hilary rummaged around in the console of the car and discovered that our passports and DIREs were in there. So that was a relief. We managed to call an MAF pilot in the area who came by (drove not flew), disconnected the differential on the vehicle and dragged us through town to the home of Dave, a Zimbabwean farmer that had given up plants to cultivate pastors. He and his wife did this from a palatial home in a tony neighborhood of Harare. The irony of this was lost on us. We were just glad for a place to hide. The walls were high. The guard dogs were big and black. Our room was comfortable and we just laid on the bed and trembled. Getting robbed was not fun. While it was taking place I was cool as a cowboy. But days later I would shake and jump and jitter. Scary world out there. Somebody points a gun at you and steals your peace of mind. And robs your theology of all its foundations. No more, “God didn’t send us to the mission field to fail.” Instead of Joshua I started preaching from Exodus, “At a lodging place on the way, the LORD met Moses and was about to kill him.” Yep, been there, done that. Luckily, Hilary didn’t grab a flint knife and cut somebody’s foreskin off so that the Lord would leave me alone. Our unfortunate occurrence provided a great opportunity for the MAF pilot to shine. His international supervisors were in town. As we drove through town with the Land Rover dragging behind, one of these slick business-types was saying, “Man, you’ve gotta tell your supporters about this.” It was as if getting robbed was really going to be the best thing that ever happened to our ministry. “No,” I said. “I’m not going to tell anybody about this.” He was insistent. The other guys started swapping gruesome stories about missionaries being robbed, and suffering in car accidents, and being eaten by lions, etc. This was making Hilary and me more and more freaky. Finally, I said, “Can you guys talk about something else?” In the next couple of days, a mechanic re-keyed the Land Rover. I managed to get into town and take out a huge pile of Zimbabwe dollars from the ATM machine, all the time with my heart pounding for fear that I’d get robbed again. Within a few days, the Landie was running and we were ready to get the heck out of there. No more driving at twilight for us. We left town at high noon and drove under the blazing sun to our destiny.

I forgive those jerks for robbing us on that evening. We were stupid to not have our guesthouse located before sundown. Sipping cappuccinos while some desperate dudes in a little white car pondered following us home and relieving us of our wallets. Doesn’t get much dumber than that. Well, I’m blaming the victim. In a “tales of missionary amazingness” style story the four guys run home, count their money and start partying. They squander all the money. One of the guys ends up in the gutter with the only thing left over from the crime: my little Gideons New Testament. He reads the plan of salvation in the opening pages and then devours the Good News and repents of his wicked ways. Years later, while attending a church meeting he shares his testimony of how through a life of crime he found the light thanks to a Bible he stole from a missionary on a cold night in George. After the service an old man walks up to the former thief who is now a pastor preaching the Gospel in the most remote of locations. The old man walks up to him and says, “Son, that was me you robbed on that day. Praise the Lord that he turned your evil deed into a chance to spread the Gospel.” The young minister would then fall at the feet of the old man and beg forgiveness and the old man would forgive him and call him brother and they would both get their picture in Guideposts. Something like that would be great. I’m still waiting.