First - the reason I'm in North Dakota. Me and Ben were on our road trip back to school, with the plan of arriving in Caronport on Tuesday. We were driving on the highway and I noticed Ben looking down at his feet and at the dashboard. He looked at me - "Matthew, something's wrong." The car's accelerator was stuck, and rising. We were already going about 100 kilometres per hour. Ben thought of simply removing the key, but thankfully he didn't - we later found out that doing so would have locked the steering in place, sending us speeding off the highway. Trying not to panic, we prayed, recalling storied of the Lord intervening in automobile mishaps, and then called a friend's parents who (a) had encountered the problem before, but (b) didn't pick up. Then, the front of the car started spraying out fluid and the brakes still weren't stopping us so we called 911. And they figured out how to make it stop. We stopped just outside a town, thankfully before we ran into any traffic lights. We got picked up by the sheriff, and the first problem, the reason behind the accelerator being stuck, was fixed easily enough.
Then we started up the car to head to the shop to get more fluid. And now the brakes - which had been struggling against the rising accelerator - weren't working at all. But that problem got fixed really easily as well.
But then it turned out the radiator was cracked. So... we've been stuck in the tiny town (ironically, bigger than Caronport) of Fessenden, waiting for the car parts to arrive and be installed, since yesterday, and should be out of here tomorrow. God's been showing his providence throughout: We went to the Motel to see about getting a room for a couple days to find out they were entirely booked up, as was the Motel in the next town over. So the guy working at the desk offers his motor home to us, free of charge, and they snuck in this morning to put ice cream treats in the fridge for us. So this has been some really sweet time of talking and preparing for Caronport, watching Parks and Recreation on Netflix, doing some work on my DL courses, and reflecting on a Summer that has, for me, been so full of healing.
So all this is to say that he is making himself known in situations that previously would have just devastated me, and that even though I haven't blogged, he has over the past two and a half months been setting me free of burdens and struggles that I had long given up on being delivered from this side of eternity. He is faithful, even when we are faithless.
