Colorado: Day 2

I awoke in the church sanctuary on Saturday morning at 7:45, got dressed and had my devotional near the front door. Matt and Justin had left earlier to get the part and help Eric fix the van. Mike, the youth pastor, arrived around 8:30 while we were finishing up our devotions and getting dressed for the day. We sat around the table in the youth room talking about seminary and the differences between working with junior and senior high students. Pastor Greg came in about that time and gave us a $100 gas card, just one more blessing from these wonderful people.

A couple of their Sunday school rooms needed to be painted, and we had just so happened to have brought painting clothes. So we changed into them and put the first coats on three of the rooms. We took a break for lunch and ate Subway that Carol and Joyce had brought the night before. As we ate, we talked about our parents and our varying relationships with them. It was a very good conversation and we got to learn a bit more about each other through it. We finished up our painting and chilled for a few hours before the guys called to say that they were done with the van and it was running. About an hour later, they returned with the van in full working order. Eric didn't ask for any payment for his troubles, but we gave him a gift anyway. It was not nearly enough for what he did for us, but it was the least we could do.

So at 5:00 pm eastern time, we loaded up the van and car and took off for Colorado again, 30 hours after we had arrived at that great town of Genoseo. The sun set only about an hour after we had gotten on the road again, so most of our driving was in the night. But the full moon lit our way down I-80. The highway was open again. We had heard reports that 15 people had died the night before in the terrible road conditions. But today, the roads were fine, save for a few patches of ice. Driving through Iowa, we counted at least one hundred cars that were in the ditch. Most were facing the wrong way, some were sideways, others were completely upside down. Jackknifed semis passed in the darkness, and some just lay on their side by the road like a carcass. It wasn't until we saw these things that we fully realized God's intervention in our trip. If our van hadn't broken down the day before, we could have easily been one of the many that were stranded in the middle of nowhere.

We passed the time by sleeping and talking and playing the alphabet game through the night. Once we got deep enough into Colorado, a slight mist lined the horizon. You couldn't really make the mountains out, but you could tell that they were there. We arrived in Boulder at 6:00 am local time. As soon as we parked in the Horizon's lot, the sun peaked up from the east. We unloaded our stuff and found our beds quickly. Laying down, we were all very grateful for God's protection and provision for His children. I don't think any of us had trouble falling to sleep after that long drive.