My mother was well aware of my early and deep
commitment to a call to mission work, but after I met Hunter and
told her of our plans to be married, she very quietly remarked,
"I suppose that being married to a preacher is almost the
same as following your dream of overseas work." In some way
she and I both knew that wasn’t quite true. However, he came
to Florida from Berea, met my parents, and we were later married
in Danforth Chapel.Seven years after that my parents and my brother came to New York, to see us and our five-year-old Peggy sail for England on the Queen Mary. My mother’s joy in seeing this take place was in knowing that I had the best of two worlds, and the call I held in my heart was to be fulfilled after all.
After five days in London, we boarded a combination freight-passenger ship headed for Capetown, South Africa, a sea journey of seventeen days. We waited there in the Andrew Murray Mission for about a week before our Chevrolet Suburban vehicle arrived and the real journey began.
Two "green kids with a five-year-old" made their way toward Southern Rhodesia, unaware of the total experience ahead, no road map of the American variety, but a general outline as to what places we would pass through on that 2,000 mile trip. No overnight accommodations were arranged beforehand. We would just take what we could find.
I wonder now how we could have been so relaxed with the uncertainty of it all. We drove through a desert-like area, which at that time I naively assumed might be the edges of the Kalahare. Not so, but the people were interesting, walking along the red clay dusty roads, with their bundles on their heads. This later became part of our everyday lives in Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe). We spent a night in a Johannesburg hotel which we found on our own, unaware of concern. The manager, realizing that Peggy and I waited in the car while Hunter went in to inquire about accomodations, told him to "go bring your family inside immediately."
After almost a week we arrived at Old Umtali, with a great deal of wonder about it all, to be welcomed by waiting fellow missionaries, grateful for an unseen guiding hand which has continued leading for the past fifty years since we stepped on African soil!
--Beth Griffin