Life with God is an adventure. Have you found that? While we so often only think of life as getting from point A to B, I think God is someone who enjoys the scenic routes of life; we see it in the way He guided the Israelites from Egypt to the Promised Land, and we see it in the way Jesus led the disciples around Galilee, Samaria and Judea almost 1500 years later. I was reminded of this a few weeks ago when we decided to go on an adventure of our own and ended up getting more of an adventure than we bargained for!
We had recently had the car repaired and Josias suggested going for a little road trip to test it out and get out of the house. We decided to drive to Quilotoa, an impressive lagoon located inside the crater of an old volcano in a section of the Andes south of us. We took the slightly longer, scenic route to arrive, taking in the glorious sunshine and green hills as we drove along the (very) windy road. We eventually arrived, after having stopped in a small community for lunch and a leg-stretch, and spent a short time walking around, looking at the lagoon and getting our photos taken with some alpacas. However, it was extremely windy and walking down into a crater isn't exactly the most age-appropriate activity for a 2- and 4-year old, so we decided to head home via the traditional route. After driving for 10 minutes, we came to a T junction with no sign. Without thinking very much about it, Josias turned right. Little did we know that this was the junction:
As you can probably gather from the map, it was a disastrous mistake. We had no phone signal, there were no turn offs, no other signs, and we were unknowingly on our way out of the Andes down to sea-level. When we came to the cloud barrier, we just assumed it was because we had come so high up (even compared to normal Andes altitude). We continued driving down, and down, and down until we eventually came to the end of the clouds and noticed the change in temperature and in vegetation around us. We drove past people going the opposite direction with loads of bananas in the back of their trucks.
We knew by now that were on the wrong road, but with no signs and no map we had no way to be exactly sure where we were. I sat with Josias' phone in my hand, nervously watching for the moment we would have enough phone signal for the map to load. That didn't happen until we were almost at Valencia (if you can find that on my little map), and after 2 hours on the road. Now that we were on a (mainly) straight stretch of road where it was safe to do so, after taking a moment to get over the disbelief of what had happened, we turned the car around and headed back the way had come. After 15 minutes or so of driving, I looked over to the dashboard and saw that we had less than a quarter of a tank of petrol left. According to Google maps, we had almost 100km to drive to get to Latacunga, the first city we would come to. We hadn't passed a single petrol station in our journey so far. There must be a petrol station before Latacunga, I said to myself, trying not to panic at the thought of running out of petrol on a narrow, foggy two lane road up the side of a mountain.
There were no petrol stations. Up and up we drove, hoping the car would keep going long enough to get back to where we started and where, hopefully, we would find petrol. I sang hymns and worship songs to the girls, and myself, convincing my heart to trust that God was looking after us. At last, we broke through the fog and with the light of the sun came the relief that the worst part was over: we were back in the mountains. As we drove past little communities, we strained our eyes searching for a petrol station. On and on we went, the sun beginning to set, casting its golden light on the hills and filling the sky with hues of pink and orange. "Maybe God let all this happen just so we could see this view!" Josias and I said to each other.
The sky was totally dark by the time we eventually began the descent into Latacunga. Josias drove in 5th in an effort to save as much fuel as possible and I desperately continued in vain to search for petrol stations using the map on his phone. Around three hours after turning around, we finally arrived in Latacunga and pulled into the first petrol station we found. We stopped at a shopping centre to get some KFC to go (chips and chicken! to Eliana and Faith), and then began the journey back to Amaguaña
It was nothing short of a miracle that we didn't run out of fuel on that journey. We drove 100km, half of it climbing a mountain, on under a quarter of a tank and the car didn't even show signs of giving up on us.
Our adventure that day taught us a few things about walking with God:
- Often, we are praying and looking for the solution to our problem (a petrol station, in this case) when God wants to do the bigger miracle; not resolve the problem but empower us to overcome it.
- We saw some incredibly beautiful views that day, but we were so anxious to get to the petrol station that we couldn't enjoy them fully. In every stage in life there are things to enjoy that we can easily miss if we're too busy worrying instead of resting in God's faithfulness.
- God often leads us on a path that may not make much sense to us, but He always has a purpose and He will always be with us, leading and protecting us.
