Protection

Not my companion but this is pretty much
what they all looked like

Sometimes I ponder the ways God has protected me from danger that I am completely unaware of.  Truly we have no idea how He has altered our paths time and time again to keep something horrible from happening to us.  It could be many times in a single day.  I hope someday when I finally meet God face to face, He’ll show me a picture of how He protected me over the course of my lifetime.

Of course occasionally we find ourselves in direct situations where we experience God’s protection in our lives in a way that we can’t deny that His hand kept us from imminent danger.  This happened to me fourteen years ago when I went to live and study for a semester in Costa Rica.

It was my second day in the country and our group of American exchange students met up for an orientation to our new city.  We each had been placed to live for the semester with local families and because we didn’t yet know our way around or how to use public transportation we were supposed to be dropped off and picked up directly by our host family. 

As we were toured around the city I noticed something quite distasteful.  The city was chalk full of scary, mangy, feral dogs.  They were everywhere.  Now while I love a cute cuddly puppy, I’ve never been a big dog lover.  These dogs were down right scary to look at and when I saw one I tried to get far, far away. 

By the end of the long day of introductions and loads of new information we gathered in the city plaza to await our rides back to our homes.  One by one my classmates were picked up.  Finally I found myself the lone exchange student waiting on my ride.  This was the era prior to the common use of cell phones so the program director had to use a pay phone to call my family.  He returned and reassured me they were on their way and would be there shortly.  He then left me there in the middle of the plaza to wait for them.  Looking back on that I really cannot believe he just left me there alone, a young 20 year old women in a foreign country with absolutely no way to contact him or anyone else should something happen.

I waited for a while and it began to get dark.  For any of you that have ever traveled to Central or South America, the cities all have these huge plazas and after dark these places can become home to all kinds of vagrants and unsavory types.  Sure enough as it got darker I began to notice some intoxicated men and other “sketchy” individuals walking nearby.  At that moment I had that panicky pit of my stomach feeling you feel when you are in danger.  What was I going to do if they approached me?  I frantically looked around me and noticed sitting nearby was one of those feral dogs I had seen roaming the streets.  “Great.” I thought.  “I’m going to be attacked by a drunk and a dog!.”  I wanted to run but I didn’t have anywhere to go.  Soon a few of the loitering men began to approach me speaking in slurred Spanish.  But just as they took two more steps in my direction the craziest thing happened.  The dog jumped up and lunged at them, biting one of them.   The startled men hurried away.

Over the course of the next half hour or so the dog barked wildly gnashing its teeth at anyone who walked even remotely near me.  If nobody was walking nearby the dog stood or sat close to my side.  I could hardly believe what I was seeing.  I had never seen this dog before in my life.  It didn’t know me, yet it sensed it needed to protect me.  Eventually, probably at least an hour after I had been left by the director in the plaza, my host family finally showed up to retrieve me.  As I drove off with them, I made eye contact with that stringy, dingy dog and silently whispered, “Thank you.”

I believe with all my heart God sent that dog to protect me.  Don’t believe it?  That’s okay, but I just cannot chalk that experience up to chance.  Sometimes I struggle with why God places His protection on some and not others.  I know He doesn’t promise I will always have His protection physically.  Spiritually yes, physically no.  Thankfully I know that His ways are not mine.  His reasons are not always understood.  I have to trust that because He is God.  I did not create Him.  He created me.  Maybe He protected me that day because He knew someday I would tell the story.  All I know is I am so very thankful for that little dog and for my God who sent him to me.