God Shows Up Again & Again!

Yay – we were set to take a road trip for a long Memorial Day weekend up to Harrison Hot Springs in British Columbia! Gary, Jeffrey and I were excited to get away, and the place looked beautiful, right on a lake!

We figured we’d take our time and stop after a few hours to have lunch in Bellingham, which was about half-way there. We got all loaded into our Pathfinder, and headed on I-5 north. I was driving, Gary was snoozing in the passenger seat, and Jeffrey was playing a video game in the back.

All of a sudden, the car did a giant LURCH – for no reason at all! Gary jolted awake, thinking that someone had hit us. I assured him that I was just driving normally and the car had made that loud noise. Could it have been the cruise control acting up? To play it safe I decided to take it off, and we continued our drive. I kept watching the gauges, but the only thing that looked a little odd was that the RPM’s seemed to be running a little fast.

who-is-sthe-creator We arrived in Bellingham, and pulled off on the exit where we waited at a red light. When it turned green I pressed the accelerator, but it didn’t seem to catch right away, so I had to push it down heavier than usual. Weird…

I whipped into the Red Robin parking lot and of course didn’t get the angle quite right, so I went to back up and straighten it out – IT WOULDN’T GO IN REVERSE! I sat there feeling like an idiot as a guy behind me tried to get by (finally he made it giving me “the look”). Gary didn’t seem too concerned at that point, so I managed to get it going forward at a little angle and we went inside to eat, deciding we’d try to find a service station after lunch.

After we ate I again got in the driver’s seat, and the reverse still just did not work. We tried putting it in neutral and everything else we could think of, but we were stuck. Oh, oh…

Of course Gary and I were both extremely grumpy by that time, and Gary decided to head inside to see if he could get someone to come out and help push the car.

Then Lord came through.

A young man came out of the restaurant with his pregnant wife; and he kindly offered to help us try and push the car. No go… Well he “just happened” (no coincidences with God!) to be driving a pickup truck with a tow line! So he hooked us up and managed to yank our car out of the parking space so we could drive forward.

This nice young man also told us of a Nissan dealer close by and gave us detailed directions on how to get there (no GPS back then). So we got on the freeway, and limped driving on the shoulder until we got there. Thank you, Father!

As it so happened (why do we get so surprised?), the people there were extremely nice and helpful, and they discovered our transmission was shot! And being a holiday weekend it wasn’t going to be finished for almost a week!

attitude But what did they do? They loaned us a beautiful 3 year-old Pathfinder for FREE to use while they rebuilt our transmission!

Yes, the weekend as a whole turned out to cost about $1500, but guess what? Just the day before we left on our trip our income tax return had come in the mail for $1000!

Plus as we continued to think about it, there’s a lot of long remote areas of highway that we traveled that day – the transmission could’ve gone out at any time, and we might not have been able to get any help for hours. Yet God’s timing was perfect, as always, and He provided for us just the right people to direct and guide us as we stressed about our car.

Why do we fail to trust Him so often?