Thursday, July 26, 2012

At Least It's Not Raining!


For months now, we’ve been looking forward to July 22, 2012.  It was the day we were scheduled to begin our amazing adventure into exploring whether or not God is calling us to full time missions work.  My kids will forever remember it as “the WORST. DAY. EVER!!!”.  I will always remember it as a day that I could actually see the spiritual battle taking place over us beginning our missions journey. 
The day before we tried to leave, Eli’s asthma started giving us problems.  Earlier in the week I had noticed the onset of symptoms and called his doctor, who started him on the typical meds that will take care of his issues.  Normally he’s better within a couple of days and it would’ve been a non-issue when Sunday rolled around.  However, Eli can never do anything “normally”…lol!  We did breathing treatments every 4 hours all week, which usually helps to deter him getting worse with his breathing issues, but not this time.  Saturday’s breathing treatments increased to every 3 hours, and even doubling the treatments a few times in the evening.  He coughed every.single.minute Saturday night into Sunday morning.  Needless to say, Jason and I had barely any sleep at all.  I guessed that I maybe slept 3 hours, but that’s probably a pretty generous guess.  Early Sunday morning my mom instinct took over and I decided to take him to the emergency room.  The doctor who came in to assess him almost immediately said he was not going to allow Eli to travel in his condition when I told him our plans for the day.  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing!  We’d been planning this for 9 months, and one doctor was going to step in and stop everything we’d been working toward.  I knew in my heart that there was a spiritual battle taking place, so I prayed right then and there for the doctor to have a change of heart, for Eli to show marked improvement, and for us to get out of there.  At that point, some dear friends showed up to pray over and anoint Eli with a healing balm.  After another breathing treatment, getting an IV put in, bloodwork, and a chest xray, a different doctor came in to check on him.  This doctor said that he wasn’t going to keep us from going on our trip, just to make sure that we have all of Eli’s medications with us in our carry-ons, and he was released from the hospital!  Talk about a miracle!  And an emotional rollercoaster!
We left the hospital and went straight to church for first service.  Throughout the two services, we were prayed over for our mission, our purpose, and our trip.  We said many see you laters, and were finally on the road to Chicago.  We were all set to ride up to the airport in a 15 passenger van with a uhaul trailer for our luggage, but the air in the van wasn’t working great, and Eli gets worse when he gets too hot, so at the last minute, I proposed that Jason, myself, and Eli follow the 15 passenger van in our  minivan.  While an inconvenience at the time, it proves to be a HUGE Godsend later in the day.  The rest of the trip to Chicago was relatively uneventful, with Jason and I both believing that our tough spiritual forces battle is continuing to take place over Eli and his asthma, which is still flaring up from time to time. 
We arrived at O’Hare, found our check-in counter, unloaded all 10 suitcases and 6 carry-ons, said our final see ya laters, and went to stand in line to check in for our flight to Los Angeles and check our luggage.  After watching Jason talk to the woman at the computer terminal for a few minutes, he calls me over to ask a few questions, leading up to the fact that she believes we need visas for our trip, and we’ve only got our passports.  That was around 4:30.  For the next 3 hours Jason was on the phone with Bill and Christina Widup (the missionaries we are going to Vanuatu to serve with) while trying to get everything straightened out so that we could get on our flight.  The result of those 3 hours was that we needed to come home and will be flying out again on Thursday, July 26 and are unsure of how long we’ll be staying in Vanuatu, but most likely less than 30 days.  There is still much confusion on this subject, and we’re still researching our options, so please continue to be in prayer that if it’s possible for us to stay for the originally planned 90 day trip, God will make it happen.  I had called Jason’s parents as soon as the desk clerk for United said that we weren’t going to be able to get on the flight and asked them to come back to the airport because we might not be able to fly out.  Luckily they were only 20 minutes into their drive back to Indiana when I got ahold of them.  After standing around the airport for 3.5 hours while Jason got everything figured out, we all headed back to Indiana…and everyone was STARVING! Lol.
We stopped for supper once we got out of Chicago, and then were on our way home, for a few minutes…and then the 15 passenger van overheated and we quickly discovered it was not going to get us home.  And this is when I almost had a meltdown.  But didn’t.  I posted our predicament on Facebook, not for the drama value, but so that people would know we were still in need of prayer in order  to get home.  Almost immediately I received texts from a couple of people who were willing to make the 2+ hour drive to come and get us in Merrillville and take us, and our Uhaul trailer of luggage, home.  While we were waiting on Rob and Amy to rescue us, we were trying to laugh about the day, counting our blessings of what had gone right, and how the day could’ve been even worse!  It was a pleasant night, not cold, not hot, Eli had finally fallen asleep in the back of our van, at least it’s not raining, everyone was still alive, we weren’t fighting, the kids were all being very well-behaved, etc…lots to still be thankful for!  Jason and I were able to take our van to a gas station to buy a few gallon jugs of water to fill up the water tank of the overheated van, and attempt to get it to a dealership instead of paying a tow bill, which was a successful adventure.  So then everyone was hanging out in the parking lot of a Mike Anderson dealership near Merrillville.  Jason’s parents decided to stay there in a motel overnight and wait on the van to get fixed the following day, so Jason took them to get the last room in the motel, and while they were gone, IT STARTED RAINING!!!!  At this point, it was funny!  Not an hour earlier we had stated that we were just thankful for the nice night and that it wasn’t raining, and then rain.  The kids ended up having a dance party in the rain, so it ended up being a memorable blessing, also! 
We got home Monday morning at 5 a.m.   Completely exhausted doesn’t even begin to describe how we were feeling, but we do know this.  If we were supposed to be on that flight out of O’Hare on Sunday, July 22 at 6:48 p.m., we would’ve been.  My previous blog post was on not worrying about this trip because this is God’s plan, not ours, and that’s what got me through the day.  This is God’s plan.  He didn’t want us on that flight.  The week leading up to our departure was crazy busy.  We had no time to rest.  We had one day of just the five of us spending time together, and that still wasn’t very restful.  We know that God has big plans for our family once we get to Vanuatu, and He knows that we weren’t as rested up as He wanted us, so we didn’t fly out on Sunday.  That wasn’t news to Him.  He wasn’t surprised by that.  Now we’ve been home since Monday morning, resting.  We’ve already said our see ya laters, and don’t want to put our kids through that again, so we’re really just spending time as the five of us together, resting.  Hopefully Eli will be all healed up tomorrow when we head out.  We did make a visit to the doctor yesterday who mentioned that he thinks Eli’s flare ups may be stress induced, so if you’d like to pray for him in that regard, we’d appreciate it.  But we know that we are still in God’s plan.  Once again, God’s got this!  

1 comment:

  1. Praying God puts Eli at ease. I ~love~ your attitudes.~ May God richly bless your family.

    Lucy

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