It’s the middle of the night, in the middle of a field, in the middle of nowhere Romania.
And we’re stuck in a ditch.
Our team spent a glorious off-weekend celebrating Yen’s 31st birthday, visiting Dracula’s castle on Halloween weekend, touring the city of Brasov with a gorgeous cable car ride. The cherry on top was Peles Castle nestled in the Carpathian mountains. We enjoyed a wonderful lunch and a breathtaking afternoon drive through a national forest; all the trees ablaze with fall colours of orange, amber, red and yellow.
We were back on the main road at around 3:30pm and began dozing through the 5 hour drive home. With only 2 hours left in our drive, we took a turn for the worse. Drifting in and out of sleep, I heard our host Marvin* mentioning a short cut on a dirt road that would cut our journey time in half. Next thing we knew, our blue minivan was stuck in the mud in some poor farmer’s field.
Over the next 8 hours of this great debacle, here are some things the Lord taught me:
Sometimes you just gotta floor it!
The first time we got stuck (yes, we got stuck not once, not twice, but three times!) Claire, our Oklahoma native who grew up on a ranch came to the rescue. She hopped in the driver’s seat, while the rest of us got out and started huffing and puffing to push the van out. Claire floored it, the wheels spun up mud all over our clothes but thankfully we got the van back on to something that resembled a field service road.
Ten minutes later our minivan was defeated by a deep puddle of water and yet again got stuck. Claire jumped into the driver’s seat again, we sloshed through the puddle and managed to get the van unstuck a second time. I’m drenched and covered in mud on a cold winter night and start laughing hysterically at our unfortunate predicament.
Throughout this World Race journey I have found myself stuck in many a ditch and I just have to do my best to get myself unstuck. Whether it looks like pushing through difficult days or pressing into community or allowing myself to be vulnerable as the team leader, the Holy Spirit in me helps me give everything I’ve got to choose into this incredible adventure and not hold back.
Avoid big ditches at all costs.
Despite having been stuck twice already and seeing no recognizable roads on the GPS and for other reasons unbeknownst to me, we forged on through some sort of a potato or soybean patch. We came to a deep ditch in the middle of this farmland, our driver slowed the van and got out to assess the situation. The ditch was too deep and I knew there was no way we would make it through but our driver is convinced that we came too far to turn back now.
So he slowly eased the van into the ditch and unsurprisingly the van got wedged, tightly wedged I might add, in the ditch. We all get out and try idea after idea to get the van out but it was clearly not budging. Our nervous laughter died down and we all tried to keep panic at bay because it’s the middle of the night, in the middle of a field, in the middle of nowhere Romania. And we’re stuck in a ditch. I walked up a close hill and the nearest lights are at least 15-20 miles away so walking to get help was out of the question and it was cold. Very cold.
This Race is about adventure, about taking the road less travelled, about trying things for the first time but when there is danger ahead, it’s reckless to keep moving forward. Some of the big ditches we have faced as a team have looked like bitterness, unforgiveness, pride, relying on our own strength, independence and whole slew of other nasty things that are very easy to get tightly wedged in. The Lord’s ways are always higher than our ways and He will never lead us astray if we will follow where He is leading us.
God is in the business of miracles.
After many unsuccessful attempts to get the van out of the ditch, our driver finally got on the phone to the local emergency services and began the long process of trying to explain where we were. Amidst the flurry of phonecalls back and forth, we hunkered down in the car trying to stay warm. We prayed, a lot, pleading that someone will be able to find us and get us out of this mess. Then, by a sheer miracle, we saw lights on the horizon! A car full of firemen arrived and quickly began preparing to tow our van out of the ditch. But the van was wedged in too tightly to be pulled out, so we started praying again.
Meanwhile, the police chief called the mayor of the county we were stuck in and asked if he could organize a tractor to come pull us out. The mayor got out of his warm bed in the middle of the night and asked a young farmer if they could use his tractor. At around 1:30am, we saw the floodlights of a tractor approaching. Hallelujah! The tractor pulled the van with all of us in it out of the ditch with little to no effort. We then began our long drive out of the field, following behind the tractor with a police escort behind us – lights flashing and all.
If only you could have seen just how in the middle of nowhere we were, the fact that they even found us is a miracle! The fact that we didn’t run out of fuel that night was a miracle! The fact that the mayor woke up in the middle of the night to answer a call was a miracle! The fact that the young farmer was willing to lend us his tractor free of charge was a miracle! This World Race has been full of miracles and I am so thankful for a God who operates in power.
I had never been so happy to see an asphalt road in my whole life when we finally made it to the main road. Then, praise the Lord, at 3:30am in the morning – a full 12 hours after what should have only taken 5 hours – we pulled into the driveway of our house in Draganesti and collapsed into our beds.
This will definitely be one of the crazy stories from the Race that I end up telling many times over. In the middle of it all this is what I learned about God. He answers prayer! He provides what we need! And He will never leave us or forsake us! I’m amazed at how quickly we learn to rely on Him when He’s all that we’ve got.
