Trampling? Try Sitting and Sleeping On "Snakes And Scorpions"!!!

Luke 10:19 (NIV)
I have give you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy; nothing will harm you.


When I was 19, I went on a 6 months missions trip to the Philippines.  The organization I went with, Mercy In Action, divided groups of students into teams and sent them out into various villages and places to conduct primary health care and educate on hygiene and the spread of disease.  I happened to be an honorary member of the team because I never went through the schooling, so sometimes I had things to do such as count out pills as the "pharmacist" and other times I had to sit and observe.  It was during one of  the "sitting" sessions that I "sat" on a poisonous centipede.
In the Philippines, they frequently lay flooring in sheets loosely over concrete to make the floors look nicer.  Because the sheets are not secured, things like creepy crawly insects and ants can crawl under them and make a nice little home for themselves.  At one particular church, they had a small platform that was covered in this manner and I, in a skirt because it was so hot, decided I would sit on the edge of this platform and watch the pharmacist count pills.
I had gotten used to the feeling of an occasional ant or two crawling on my legs or my arms and sometimes up the back of my shirt.  So long as they didn't bite, it wasn't worth the effort of finding it .  It was so hot, too, that you really didn't care if a water buffalo came and sat on you.  Actually, that might have been preferred, it was that hot and miserable.
I had one such feeling-of-an-ant crawling on the upper part of the inside of my leg and thought nothing about it.  I made a joke to myself about having ants in my pants but I didn't care.  The feeling continued on lot longer than normal, and I then felt concerned that it was not just an ant but perhaps I had sat on a nest of ants.  Or maybe it was something else, like a cockroach.  Or even worse, a spider.  I had to do something, and fast!
It is not polite to reach into your skirt in any social setting, but because I was behind a table, I very quietly and sneakily did so only to find that my hand grasped something a LOT larger than an ant.  I pulled it out, and my hand was full of a ginormous centipede which had found a nice, warm home in my skirt.  There was one second of shock and then I threw it, shouting.  A Filipino man saw what I threw and immediately became alarmed.  He pulled off his sandal, for that is how Filipinos kill insects, and tried to kill it, but it was too fast.  It got away and crawled under the flooring, back to where it had probably come from.  The man tried to rip up the flooring to get to it but did not find it.
Meanwhile, a team member observed this exchange and came over to see if I was ok.  The Filipino man informed us that it was poisonous and could kill with one bite.  Or, it would cause so much pain that you would wish you had been killed.  The team member told me that another missionary had seen a Filipino man cut off his arm rather than endure the pain of a bite of one of those centipedes.  And it had been crawling in my skirt, and momentarily in my hand!
When I thought it through further, our whole team had all been sleeping on that floor in mosquito nets.  The centipede had had multiple opportunities to find someone to bite (or to make a home in someone else's skirt), but we had never seen it before then.  How blessed I was to have God's protection just as Jesus said in Luke 10:19!!!  When we are in God's will we can not only trample on snakes and scorpions (or poisonous centipedes), but we can also sit on them or sleep on them... and no harm will come to us.
Be encouraged to do what God tells you to do, for he has given you authority to overcome the power of the evil one.