Brandon
Joined: 22 Sep 2005 Posts: 63
|
Posted: Thu Sep 22, 2005 9:19 pm Post subject: Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger Sun Jun 05, 200 |
|
|
Today was a very testing day. Of course God worked everything out in the end, but along the way Matt and I felt very vulnerable.
We went to church in the morning and knew we were going to get a late start. The plan was to get dropped off at exactly the same spot we had been picked up the night before and going from there. We filled up at the Old Country Buffet and continued onto our gas station. We were a big sluggish after our enormous meal and it was extremely hot and humid, so we didn't really get going until about 3:30. This was ok because we would be able to go until 10 pm and get picked up by the Miniches again that night because we would still be within 15 miles of there house and we never turn down an offer to stay. Matt went to great pains to ensure that this would not compromise our unsupportedness, so we made sure everything was in the stroller and we started from exactly the same place we stopped.
The going was slow at first because of the heat and our full stomachs, but once we settled into our groove, we went smoothly up and down the rolling hills. By the way, I just happened to shatter the stroller speed record today going down one of the steeper hills. It is now 18.9 mph! To tell the truth, that is probably the fastest I have ever run in my life. I didn't even try to set the record, I was just holding onto the stroller for dear life. My legs were going so fast that I thought I was going to fall down and get dragged the rest of the way down.
It was a little later that the fun really started. We were at a crossroads and I hadn't really been paying attention to where we were going because I thought we were just supposed to follow the same road for a few miles. The atlas doesn't show streets small enough and my little printout of the route was poorly labeled, so I consulted the text directions that we have in a folder. I looked through them and neither of the streets that intersected was mentioned in the directions. This led to a bit of panic, but after talking to a couple of local people, we found out where we were. We were off course, but we were still headed in the right direction. It didn't even add much to our mileage total. What it did do was make it impossible for us to make it to the rendezvous point where we were supposed to get picked up. I adjusted our route to bring us to another easily reachable area, and we would just use the cell phone to change the pick-up place.
Well, we got to the intersection where we wanted to be picked up and there was nothing there: no businesses, no houses, no anything. It was two decent sized roads, so this surprised me. Anyway, we figured the intersection would be easy to find, so we reached for the cell phone. The bag we usually keep it in was nowhere to be found, so we had no phone and weren't sure where it was. (We have it now. Matt left it in the room he slept in last night.) We still weren't in panic mode yet, so we calmly set off in search of a house. It was about 9:30, so we figured we might have some trouble finding someone willing to let us use their phone, but people had been kind to us up to that point and we had no other alternative. We started walking down the road and there were no houses. We saw lights up ahead and ran to them, but they turned out to be for a landfill and no people or houses were in sight. We had gone about a mile down the road when I told Matt to stay with the stroller and I would run ahead. In the pitch dark I scared some deer off of the road as I sprinted ahead. I hoped that around every corner there would be a house, but there were none. Finally, about a mile from where I left Matt, I knocked on the door of a house and was let in. I can't imagine what I looked like to those people--sweaty, disheveled, desperate--but they were kind enough to let me use their phone.
I got a hold of Aunt Julie and she was on her way in no time. She came and got me and we went to go get Matt, who by this time was wondering whether or not I was still alive because I had been gone for about half an hour. He also heard a lot of movement and some strange noises from the woods, which would have been freaky considering it was such a secluded area with some creepy looking landfill lights.
We're safe now and wiser for it. We're probably better equipped mentally after this experience, but it's not a situation we'll face very often. This was a unique situation where we were trying to meet someone at a specific time and place and they depended on us. At any other time we would have found a place to camp before dark and attacked the problem in the light of day.
By the end of the whole thing I was frustrated, humbled, and a bit scared, but I guess sometimes God has to break down before he builds up. I can already tell I'm going to grow a lot through this whole thing, so I'm excited.
Anyway, I hope you get a laugh out of our misfortune, because it really is pretty funny how things ended up happening. Well, you live and learn.
Brandon |
|