Travelling Mercies

If you've been raised in "the church", you have probably heard, during a prayer meeting, someone ask for travelling mercies. For my readers that were raised in a church, what this person was asking for was safe travel from their home to whatever location they were about to travel to. I always thought this was a funny phrase. Why not just say, "hey, I'm driving to Nashville and back this coming week. Pray for me that I'll have a safe trip".

Last Friday, I found out what travelling mercies is all about. On Wednesday, we loaded up large and medium U-Haul trucks and headed out in a convoy with the trucks, our mini-van and our car. Jason, our oldest son had flown to Tucson to help us load and drive to Carlinville, Illinois. About an hour out of Tucson, the AC in the large truck I was driving stopped working. While it didn't seem to affect the truck's performance, the temperature wasn't very pleasant. A few minutes outside of Deming, New Mexico, the smaller truck that Jason was driving blew a rear tire. Fortunately, he was able to safely get off the roadway and call U-Haul. We were back on the road in an hour or so, but we didn't make it to Socorro, New Mexico like we had wanted. The next morning we started out from Truth and Consequences, New Mexico, header for Chandler, Oklahoma, just east of Oklahoma City. We had discovered that motel rooms were hard to come by on Highway 40 near Oklahoma City because of the Moore tornado just days before. We stopped in Amarillo, Texas to fuel up, and when we climbed back into our vehicles, my truck would not start. We called U-Haul and a mechanic came and diagnosed the problem as being the AC compressor that failed was dragging down the whole engine and the alternator wasn't charging the battery like it should. He said he could probably fix it in 3-4 hours and I'd be on my way. With this information, I sent Kathy, Jason, and Shawn on to Chandler so they could get settled into the motel at a decent hour and I would follow them later that evening. After they had been gone an hour or so, U-Haul decided they couldn't fix the truck until Friday morning. On Friday morning, I called U-Haul to see how the repair was going, only to find that they didn't know where the truck was. It had been towed to the wrong location. After a number of communication snafus, I finally left Amarillo at 11:30 am.

As I entered Oklahoma on Highway 40, I began to see an ominous wall of clouds ahead of me, to my left. The closer I got to OKC, the blacker the clouds became. I had originally planned to stop in OKC for dinner, but then the radio station I was listening to began broadcasting tornado watches, then warnings, and finally "take precautions now", messages. I think all of us have stories of intense prayer in times of stress. I can tell you that my prayer life at that moment escalated to an all-time high. By the time I was an hour or so east of OKC, I began to hear radio reports of another tornado that had touched down and had closed I-40 and I-35. I had been at that intersection as I traveled through OKC!

As I crossed the Oklahoma/Missouri border, I stopped for gas and bought some snacks for dinner. I was determined to beat the bad weather that was right behind me. As I reached Rolla, Missouri, torrential rain, and thunder and lighting caught up with me. I slowed down considerably, and still had times where I was guessing where the lane was because the fastest speed on my wipers couldn't keep the water off the windshield. I drove an hour and a half in this weather. When I reached St. Louis, the rain let up some and I stopped to pick up Josh. He was going to spend the night in Carlinville and help us unload. As we left St. Louis, the weather turned bad again and we passed several sections of neighborhoods along Highway 270 that had no power. When we got to the little town of Gillespie, Illinois, just 12 miles from Carlinville, we were stopped on Highway 4 by the Highway Patrol. They told us a tornado had just gone through there and there were power lines and trees down on the highway. They re-routed us on a couple of very narrow country roads. At 1:30am on Saturday morning my driving saga was over. My spiritual life was in complete order, my prayer life at it's peak. I had experienced travelling mercies... (the picture is of the high school in Gillespie that was nearly completely destroyed by the tornado) If I hadn't stopped to pick Josh up in St. Louis, I probably would have been on Highway 4 when the tornado did its damage.

Travelling Mercies....remember that phrase for your next prayer meeting.