In January 2008, my wife and I were reading the Scriptures and Genesis 12:1 literally jumped off the pages, which says “Leave your country and your father’s house and go to a land I will show you.” I remember telling my wife, “Honey, by the end of this year we will not be in Ghana.” What we didn’t know was how, when or where, but the message was very clear. By June, God had kicked me out of Ghana to Côte d’Ivoire and my wife had gone to Canada to study. I was a doctor in a military hospital in Ghana, and was sent on a peacekeeping mission to Côte d’Ivoire, to the UN hospital in Bouake. We had a surgeon, and I came as the physician. Exactly three weeks after I arrived, I was traveling south to the capital, Abidjan, with our second-in-command and a driver, a staff sergeant. Just about an hour before we reached the city, an oncoming car burst a tyre, somersaulted across the dividing island, and came straight at us. There was no time to react except to cry out something like, “Jesus! Help!” There was a tremendous crash and the windows shattered. I was surprised to find myself still alive and checked for broken bones. Nothing, only a deep cut down my upper arm. I looked over and realized my doctor colleague (the 2IC) was already dead. The driver was dangling over the steering wheel, in pain. I managed to call for help and we got him to the side of the road but I could tell he was already quadriplegic. There was no ambulance, no support. Eventually, someone gave us a ride in the bucket of a pickup truck with sack loads of grain in it. The poor man suffered terribly on the way to the hospital. He was operated on, evacuated to Ghana but died within 2 weeks. My only consolation was that the Holy Spirit prompted me to speak to him on the way to the hospital and he accepted Jesus as we went. This accident changed everything for me, because the Lord had spared me and I felt he had spared me for a purpose beyond medicine. My zeal for the Lord flared up. I got born again, again and felt like I had come back from the dead. At the end of the one year tour of duty, I left and went to Canada, knowing I was going as a missionary. God has done all kinds of things with us since then. You can’t have an experience like that and come out the same. You can have status and wonderful things, but it doesn’t matter. We passed soldiers on the way who saluted us, but death does not salute. We had money, but we couldn’t bribe death. We were educated doctors, but that did not save us. My favourite Scripture is Galatians 2:20: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Dr. Yaw Perbi, founding member of Send Africa Network’s International Leadership Team, Co-author of ‘Africa to the Rest’, Lausanne Movement leader and International Director, Kwiverr