I am back in California.
A few weeks ago I drove from florida to california.
It wasn’t easy – I had to leave a place that had nourished me in a way that I hadn’t experienced before. In my prayers about my schedule I’d heard the Lord give me the number 16, and hearing that and wanting to be home for the holidays (never knowing when my last gathering that included my Grandmother) i’d said ‘see ya later’ to my landing zone parents, gotten in the used car Id bought, and headed west for thanksgiving.
In this post I want to share a little bit about what being in a “golden state” is.
I know California is called “the golden state”, but that isn’t what I’m referring to by titling this post “the golden state”.
In order to share that, I need to take you on my trip back to california…
…
It’s cold.
The weather in florida had changed drastically the last three days I’d been there.
Suddenly the mild average heat turned frigid at night. I woke several nights with cold toes. When I drove away I thought “my front tires look like they need a little air.” But I was on a tight 5 day schedule to make it for thanksgiving. I also wanted to stop and spend one day with my sister and her family who live in Arizona. So I was on a schedule!
I would take care of my tires when I stopped for gas.
I didnt really think about it again until i stopped for gas near midnight somewhere in Texas.
“We dont have air here,” the lady told me. “But they have it if you pull around back to where the trucks get gas.”
The air thing back with the trucks didn’t have a gauge meter thing that told you how much you put in your tires. But I thought, “no prob. i can just eyeball it“.
Maybe 30 miles down the road the steering wheel indicated something was wrong.
How you ask?
It was jerking to the right like a dog pulling on it’s leash.
I knew it was the tires…’it will go away after a while,‘ I thought. But it didn’t.
Some 20 miles further down the road i was starting to cold sweat. I stopped at a gas station, ran in, and bought a tire air gauge.
My tires require no more than a max psi of 44.
Gauging them showed me that my 2 front tires that I’d filled were above 80psi!
O my goodness. you cannot imagine the cold panic that i went through me as i released air until they were both under 40.
How could I have been so stupid?! The right front tire was definitely feeling lumpy. As if something was trying to crawl out.
I got back into the car and hoped as i pulled out onto the freeway that the lumps on the tire would just flatten out. The Lord can heal a tire, right?
…
No such luck.
After about 30 more minutes I saw an DISCOUNT TIRES place flash past on the right. Should I get off the freeway and go back? No. I hated the Texas turn arounds. The way the right side of the road only goes right, and you have to keep going straight till you find an under/over pass to backtrack around to get back to the place you past.
If you know what I’m saying, you know. And if you don’t, you dont. Good luck when you visit Texas.
After another 50 miles I was afraid for my safety (this dog was getting feral) and I saw in the distance a DISCOUNT TIRE place coming up. So I pulled off the freeway and found a 24/7 open gas station, pulled in front of the convenience store and crawled into my sleeping bag. I would go first thing in the morning when they opened.
…
Well, yes. I had overfilled my tire and the threading was separating creating bubbles on my tire.
But the man was more worried about my back right tire (which was a few years older than my front two).
“If you don’t change this back tire – well. It’s more likely to blow than the front one. Id rather you keep that bubbly one and replace this one!”
He was able to give me a discount so I decided to trust God about my gas money and changed them both.
“It’s really good that you came to this one,” he said when I told him I’d slept overnight at the gas station and waited for them to open. “We have another one near the freeway before you get to us, but it’s in a really bad area.”
…
After I got back on the freeway I saw scant civilization for the next 8 hours.
…
I went to visit my sister and the morning I was leaving she asked me if we could take my car to do a few chores.
Driving slowly through the parking lot of the store I noticed a specific sound, like Id rolled over a giant piece of bubble gum and it was stuck to my tire.
I checked my tires before going in the store, but saw nothing strange.
“We have a Discount Tire place around the corner,” my sister looked at me with concern. “Please take it there before you head off.”
Her house was right off the freeway, and the noise went away when I pulled away from her house. I didn’t feel like I had time to stop for a checkup – but ‘what could it hurt‘ i decided.
God’s grace.
“I just got them changed yesterday – maybe, I don’t know, they didn’t attach something right?”
“The noise goes away the faster you go?” he asked. “That doesn’t sound right.” He pulled on some black gloves as we walked out to my car. Then he knelt and checked each tire with a little tool – measuring the tread.
When I got the two new tires they’d put them on the front of the car and rotated the one good tire to the back, so that now I had one 1 year old and one 3 year old tire on the back.
When he got around to the 3 year old tire, he ran his hand over it and jerked his hand away, “It cut me!” he exclaimed. I bent down and looked into the tirewell and saw an inch high metal comb 6 inches long standing straight in the air on the back inner side of the tire.
…
After I left that tire place I saw no civilization for about 5 hours, and then it was spotty gas stations all the way to san diego.
…
Sometimes God will let you over fill your tire to protect you.
This is the golden state.
The state of being inside God’s provision.
The place where the illogical becomes the miracle.
I believe that God allowed me to pop that tire so that that back right tire would get fixed.
I believe God had my sister delay my leaving with chores so that I wouldn’t have been stranded next to the Mexican border in the middle of nowhere without any phone service.
If I had left her place and not done chores I would have pulled onto the freeway and never slowed enough to hear that gum sticking noise.
What do you think?
Are you in the golden state?
Do you want to be?
It is going to take you trusting that God is using the upsets and disasters in your life to provide and protect you.
