Colorado: Day 1

At 6:00 am on Friday, after praying over our trip in the frigid morning air, our team left in one van and one car for Boulder, Colorado. Our team consisted of nine members: Allie, Matt, Justin, Kenny, Chelsea, Alicia, Riley, Jim and myself.

The roads were rough starting out. At that hour, it was still dark and cold and ice covered the roads. After the sun came up, however, the roads got a little better and the only major problem for a few hours was the harsh winds tugging on the van.

But then tragedy struck in Illinois. The check engine light came on in the van and the engine started to misfire. Matt decided that we had better find a repair place in a local town. The next exit was for a small town called Atkinson, but unfortunately, the town's only repair shop (on its dead end main street) was full for the day. They instructed us to drive to the next town to the Dodge garage and having no other options, we did.

The garage was located in a slightly larger town called Genoseo, IL. While they diagnosed the van's problem, the nine of us waited in the local Culver's for the next four hours. The staff was great and the people were wonderful there. At one point, in passing, Matt noticed a couple guys sitting at a table reading a book that he had read. Matt struck up a conversation and found that they were the pastor and youth pastor of a local church. He told them our situation and the pastor gave us his card in case we needed anything. a couple hours later, while the nine of us were trying to decide where to go if the car could not be fixed, a couple of ladies named Carol and Joyce overheard our problem. Carol was a retired social worker and invited us to stay at her house if we needed a place to sleep that night. She was deeply concerned about our welfare and had heard that the weather was so bad that they had actually closed I-80 past Des Moines.

We prayed for the trip and read Isaiah 33 and found some striking similarities to our plight in the chapter. There were also a lot of things that had nothing to do with our situation, but that's not as fun to talk about. Just as we were finishing up, we got the call from to garage. They estimated about $700 to fix the van. Since we did not have this kind of money, we decided to keep driving the van to Riley's grandparent's house and see if we could get it fixed there somehow. After driving just ten miles, however, the van started stalling out on the highway. So we turned around and headed back for Genoseo. We called the Pastor from Culver's and made our way to his church. We also got a severe scolding from Carol when we called her and told her what had happened.

We pulled into Geneseo Evangelical Free Church and sat in the lobby for a few minutes. It turns out that Pastor Greg was just about to meet with a guy that could fix our van. I believe his name was Eric. The church was gracious enough to invite us to stay the night in their building while we got the van fixed. We set up our headquarters in the youth group facility in their basement and met the Youth Pastor, Mike. We had some very stimulating conversations with him and enjoyed a rousing game of Settlers of Catan, which I am now addicted to.

Many people came by with food for us, and word kept going around about the highways being closed and horrible traffic accidents ahead of us. Outside, the wind was blowing so hard that the snow was falling almost completely horizontal. We called Carol and told her that we were safe and staying at the church and she and Joyce arrived a few hours later with enough food to feed us for a few days. They brought McDonald's and Subway, as well as packs of milk and cookies and all kinds of snacks. This was after some nice women from the church brought us sloppy joes and scotcheroos. We thanked them many times for their graciousness and thoroughly enjoyed their blessing.

We found out that Eric would be able to help us get the part and fix the van for only a couple hundred dollars. We would be on our way again the next day. We came together and shared with each other of God's great provision for us in our distress. We also went back to Isaiah 33 and found more similarities to our situation.

After praying for God to bless all those wonderful people of Genoseo that helped us in our time of need, we put our couches and sleeping bags together and went to bed in a place we never would have dreamed we'd be that night.