UNPREDICTABLE GLORY: A TRUCKING MAMA'S TESTIMONY

Dear Readers, You are getting this a second time because "Unpredictable" was misspelled the first time, and I couldn't stand it.  I know; it is a neurosis.  I can't help it; I taught English for too many years!

I am definitely a pray-er, but sometimes I do it poorly.  I know my tendency to ask God to do things His way and then with the very next breath, to begin telling Him specifically how.  For this reason, as I prayed for weeks for the upcoming trip with Larry, I made a concerted effort to mean it when I asked God simply, “Show us Your glory.”

            And now here I am back to report how He did that with no help at all from me. 

            I definitely had my ‘druthers about places we might be sent.  I had my ‘druther not’s, too;  and, in classic Almighty fashion, some of those places I intended to be disappointed with were places God intended to use to teach me some humility and foster more blind trust in Him at the same time. I was hoping like crazy without actually dictating to God my wish-list, to go east, preferably northeast, perhaps even north northeast up into Canada where he has been sent several times.  I was envisioning eating lobster in New England and maybe seeing Niagara Falls into the bargain.

 But instead, we were sent to Georgia—Atlanta, Valdosta, Savannah— and Memphis, then Arkansas, back to Houston, down to Freeport, up to Wichita, Kansas, back to Houston, and over to New Orleans and back.  Mostly south with very little northness.   Mostly familiar with very little exotic.  Those are logistical facts of the trip. HOWEVER, logistics are rarely the whole story, and they are definitely just a minor part of this one.

  I am so thankful that we can depend upon Holy Spirit to help us ask aright and, in fact, to do a lot of our praying for us.  Otherwise, I would have never thought to repeat the prayer for weeks ahead, “God, just show us your glory however and wherever you choose.”  He answered my prayer with exclamation marks.

I’m assuming had we gone north we would have missed the autumn foliage, one of the very specific reasons I had wanted to go during October, because the Southeast was full of it!  Alabama, Georgia, and Arkansas were screaming!  For miles and miles our eyes were assaulted with a near garish display of oranges, reds, and bright gypsy yellows.  No child’s brash rendering could have captured this lovely reality on God’s palette.  I had forgotten about the mountains in northern Alabama and the way the waxy magnolias in the Deep South (even without blooms!) punctuate so beautifully the soft, velvety evergreens.  I thought I knew all about Louisiana, but I had never witnessed anything like the Atchafalaya River Basin with its eighteen-and-half-mile bridge spanning mysterious cypress swampland that resemble a Van Gogh masterpiece. Also, we got to dine not only at The Lady and Sons, Paula Deen’s restaurant in Savannah, and The Rendezvous in Memphis, our favorite ribs in the whole, wide world, but also at Jason’s Deli in Little Rock with Norm and Susie, our old friends whom we met in Germany thirty-five years ago!  We laughed our way through two quick hours and all talked at once like we always did.  Pure delight! Our eyes were wide open, as we promised God they would be, to take in everything He chose to include on this Gloryland Tour. 

But the trip was not only a cornucopia of God’s visual glories; it was a bold display of His care and providence.  What we never could have predicted was the Thing that was brewing out in the water and preparing to crash into the Northeast.  Sandy, the Perfect Storm, targeted the very route of my dreams with intense irony.  I didn’t get my lobster, but I also didn’t get Sandy’s wrath.  We stayed in the south, but we stayed warm and dry.  We didn’t see Niagara Falls, but what we did see were regular meals cooked with unwavering electricity, dry roads to travel, and water for showers at every stop.  And the folks in the wake had one less big truck and two fewer stranded bodies to deal with. We realized, and we gave thanks.

And then there was the glory of the bond of peace and togetherness that we had hoped for between the two of us but that honestly we had wondered about A LOT !  Larry worried that I would overreact to the traffic, scream, “Watch out!” catapulting his reflexes into a wreck that would wipe out an entire interstate highway full of innocent travelers in their comparatively wimpy vehicles. (I had pretty much the same vision, but mine included what worse thing might have also happened had I NOT shouted out my warnings just in time to save us.) I think we both had worried a little about the ill effects of cabin fever upon a couple who had, yes, missed each other while apart, but also had, yes, formed our own separate habits and routines designed for solitude. And yet, none of those things happened.  We really did enjoy each other’s company; a bonus was that neither was there any panicky out-screaming nor metal crunching… not even one wreck!  God’s glory every bit.

Now, I must tell you a tiny bit of Chapter Two.  The very next trip, can you guess where Larry was sent?  Ontario and Niagara Falls.  At least he didn’t get any lobster.