A tiger killed a man and terrorized a village nearly 100 years ago. My grandfather, a missionary to India, shot the tiger. Its massive head and hide were preserved and then passed down through our family as a carpet until it landed in the most improbable of places: in a Brahmin priest’s prayer room on the shores of Lake Michigan.

Dad grew up in India. He returned to the United States in 1938 after finishing Woodstock High School, Mussoorie, Landour, India to attend Goshen (Ind.) College. There he met my mother. Mom learned to make Indian curry soon after she married Dad, a task that was not easy in the 1940s and 1950s when Indian foods were not commonly available here.

All seven of us children were raised on rice, curry, and dal, which Mom served on special occasions nearly from the time we were born. Steeped in Indian food and Indian stories, we grew up with a special fondness for India, an exotic land and culture we had heard much about but had never seen.

Over the years, the tales Dad told us of his youth became family legends. We could almost imagine going along on the camping trips in the jungle where his parents held revival services.

In these camps, they prepared large pots of rice and the curry to feed those who attended. They traveled in a Model T Ford imported with great difficulty from America, fueling it from large gasoline cans strapped to the running boards. The car was carried across rivers on long poles manned by native porters.

We heard of countless other adventures. Dad told of the time his dog, Carlos, chased a mouse up the pant leg of a seated missionary.

He told of Woodstock students standing at a certain spot on the campus from which vantage point, if they looked over a cliff in a certain fashion, they could often see a pair of eyeglasses lodged in a tree which had belonged to a missionary kid who had fallen to his death years earlier.

He told of low caste Indians who were electrocuted by 220 volt electric fences set up by landowners protecting their crops from theft.

He told of living in houses having huge bamboo curtains called “punkas,” with a rope connected to them that allowed a servant “punka walla” to swing these curtains back and forth for hours, fanning the house’s occupants.

He talked about an “icy ball” refrigerant device. It consisted of two balls containing a toxic ammonia refrigerant. One end would be heated in a fire by the cook. As it cooled, the other end would become very cold and could be used to make ice cream.

Finally, there is the tale of the tiger. My Mennonite missionary grandpa, Ralph, was summoned to the village where a wild tiger had killed a man from the village.

Grandpa was a pacifist and was protected from personal dangers by his faith in the Word of God. However, he was also a practical man and didn’t neglect his family’s safety. When it came to dealing with marauding tigers, leopards and elephants, he found it prudent to possess a rifle capable of taking out large game.

So Grandpa shot and killed the tiger endangering the village. Its skin was cured and turned into a fur rug, including a realistic fur-covered plaster-of-Paris head complete with glowing glass eyes, a plaster of Paris tongue, real tiger fangs and even whiskers.

Long before tigers were designated as endangered species the skin traveled back to Indiana in Grandpa’s steamer trunk. There it lay in the den of his house he called “Westwind.” As children, we were fascinated by the gaze of this fearsome beast: by its glare, by the texture of its fur and by the location of the hole in the skin resulting from the fatal bullet.

Years later when Grandpa died, my uncle bought Westwind but no longer wanted the animal skins lying on the floor of the den. No one else really wanted them, either. A sentimentalist, I agreed to take in the tiger—to my wife’s considerable chagrin.

When I tried to display the skin—a perfect accompaniment to the antique Art Deco furniture in the guest bedroom—the tiger frightened our new daughter-in-law. It quickly found itself in a box in the attic and was rarely seen again.

It moved with us to Goshen (Ind.) a few years ago but was no more welcome in our new house than in the old and resided on a basement shelf along with the other memoirs of our lives.

Recently, my brother and his wife built a vacation home on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, an architectural masterpiece. He texted us a picture of the new mantle he had just installed over the fireplace.

On its face was the carved legend “Westwind.” I called to ask if he had named his home after Grandpa’s. Surprised that I remembered the connection, he said that he had.

Suddenly we were sharing memories of Grandpa and Dad’s youthful tales. I reminded him that I possessed the tiger skin and asked him, half-jokingly, whether he was interested in it for his house. Declining with a smile in his voice, he assured me that his wife wouldn’t like the tiger skin any more than did my wife.

However, 15 minutes after I hung up the phone he called me back. My brother is married to an Indian woman. She is Hindu, and in fact her father is a Brahmin priest.

My brother and his wife had constructed a prayer room in their new home for her father’s use. Decorated in maroon and white, colors traditional in a Hindu temple, the floor was covered in slate imported from India.

After I had talked to him about the tiger skin, my brother was informed that tiger skins are an important part of Hindu ceremony. Far from being disinterested in an 80 year old tiger skin killed in the wilds of colonial British East India, on reconsideration he deemed the skin perfect for their home.

What an historical coincidence! Over time spanning nearly a century, and across vast geographical, religious and cultural divides, circumstances had reconnected people whose ancestors were about as different from one another as one could even imagine in 1920. These circumstances completed a circle of cosmic proportions.

Yet, there is irony in this tale. 94 years ago, my Mennonite grandparents left the relative comfort of an American Midwest farm to serve as missionaries in a colonial land of devastating poverty, inequality and servitude to British culture that was India in the early 1900s. They did so in order to bring the good news of Christ to the people of India. They lived there for most of a generation.

When my father returned from India at age 18, he and the other missionary kids were different than their Mennonite contemporaries, most of whom had never left the locales of their birth. Missionary kids had experienced things they could hardly describe to the others.

For example, according to the Woodstock High School yearbook, during his senior year my father declared that he wanted to become a physician to search for a cure for leprosy. He had actually seen people suffering from this disease; Midwestern Mennonites would have only read about leprosy in the Bible.

Through their fathers’ stories, my generation inherited a fondness for India, its culture, its food, and in their imaginations, its scenery, its crowding, its noise, and its wild monkeys, tigers, leopards, and birds.

Grandpa’s grandchildren and even his great-grandchildren chose to travel to India, to study there, to teach there, to learn local dialects, and to carry out anthropologic research. One even chose a mate of that heritage.

This tale has provoked different responses in persons who hear it. An Asian friend who attends a Mennonite church was struck by the image of a pacifist missionary owning a rifle.

He commented about the colonial overtones of the story. The fact that a villager came running to the missionary “Sahib” seeking protection from a marauding tiger probably indicated that the villagers themselves did not possess such weapons in British colonial India.

Apparently, however, a white American missionary could possess the power of such arms. Even the word “Sahib,” a term of honor, connoted something negative when subjugated people feel obligated to use the term to address members of an occupying army.

Though Grandpa would never have been part of an army, the distinction between a Mennonite missionary with a rifle and a member of the British colonial army might not have been clear to everyone. The fact that the tiger skin from a tiger shot by a Christian missionary and passed through our family ended up in the American prayer room of a Brahmin priest? With a smile my Asian friend said, “That’s karma!”

While they haven’t called it “karma,” American Mennonite Christians hearing this tale have typically focused on this last consideration: A missionary who spent most of his life converting Indians to Christianity, whose descendant married an unconverted Indian. Ironic yes, but surprising?

Missionaries and their families in the early 20th century were exposed to people and circumstances they couldn’t have imagined before they left home.

When churches sent people into foreign lands to teach others about Christ, should they have been surprised that these missionaries brought back understanding of and fascination for foreign cultures and people when they returned? Was teaching people about Christ supposed to be just a one-way communication?

There are other ironies as well. Americans living in large colonial mansions with servants who cooked, cleaned, and powered curtain-like fans, much like the British military occupiers stationed there at the time? American-built church buildings architecturally similar to those in the American Midwest but located in Indian savannahs? Shooting a tiger threatening a village, but then decorating one’s den with the dead animal’s skin?

So what resulted from these mission efforts?

Looking back nearly a century, who “converted” whom? Did work in foreign missions teach more to the Indians or to the missionaries?

Whatever the foibles of our missionary forefathers, the result of their work is that there are now more Indian, Asian, and African Mennonites than there are in North America and Europe. Grandpa’s work was very effective when measured by that standard.

On the other hand, it is clear that missionaries also learned a lot from the people they encountered in their missions. Grandpa’s descendants—now spanning several generations—have inherited a legacy of fascination for and comfort with India, Indians, Asians, and indeed most all “foreigners.”

Grandpa’s descendants are different people than they would have been had he never answered the call to mission work—perhaps more different than Grandpa might have willed had he thought about it 94 years ago. It appears that God may work through us despite our imperfections, on a time scale which exceeds the span of our lives.

This old missionary story also raises questions for those of us who are not missionaries in the traditional sense. Churches have excluded people for a lot of reasons over the years.

Are we to love and accept others into our midst despite their differences from us, or must we first change them into something more like us? Referring to issues confronting past generations of Mennonites, should they have accepted women who didn’t wish to wear head coverings? Women who cut their hair or wore slacks? People who smoked or drank alchohol? Men who joined the military? People who worked on Sunday?

In more recent context, should we now accept people who have been divorced and remarried? Those who are living together without marriage or have had children outside of wedlock? People who are gay, lesbian, or transsexual? Who are not Mennonite? Who are not Christian?

This is getting frustrating. When will things stop changing? When will people stop pushing us to accept differences and to reconsider our beliefs about what is right and wrong? Where should we draw the line?

This last question may be the most important. Should we be drawing lines? Does God wish that we define virtue, and that we cut ourselves off from those we find lacking? If Heaven is reserved for those who don’t associate with sinners, it is likely to be a very lonely place.

Maybe we need not feel obligated to answer such questions. Perhaps faith is the “walk” with God and with one another rather than having complete understanding of or intellectual agreement on questions of faith, of “right,” of “wrong.” I find guidance in the words of the prophet Micah:

He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.
(Micah 6:8)

For me, I’m quite happy to have a lovely sister-in-law who is generous, caring, a comfortable companion, and a master Indian chef. And to have finally found someone who properly appreciates our family’s tiger skin with its memorable tale.

Mark Smucker is a practicing cardiologist who has been a member of and has regularly attended Mennonite churches for more than 50 years.