There are so many times in life where you think you’re doing one thing, but actually, God is teaching you another. I’m old enough and have walked with the Lord long enough to know this truth, and yet, I seem to remember it for the first time, every single time.
Our big summer trip took us from Minnesota to Tennessee, over to Colorado and back home again. “Forty-nine hours in the car!” Elsie would tell you. And it was a really great time. But while we were going about our days, the Lord had a truth He was embedding into our hearts. Our first night at the Homestead Festival we had dinner with David and Kimberly, the founders of Azure Standard, an independent food distributor that drops food all over the nation without a storefront. I asked how their business began, and David told me that his father was friends with Bob, of Bob’s Red Mill. David’s father grew organic wheat—a lot of it, for Bob. Bob had a partnership with a grocery store chain that was selling his flour, but then that fell through, leaving David’s dad with 500 acres of organic wheat. So they had to find their own buyers, and literally drive the organic wheat to the people who wanted it.
I shook my head in amazement, “Your dad must have thought this was a disaster. And yet God was like, ‘just give me 30 years…I think you’ll be impressed.” Because now Azure has thousands of drop sites—even Alaska, Hawaii, Canada and the South Pacific.
Two days later I was talking to a mom as our kids played in a giant mud puddle together. She told me how when her kids were little she went back to school to become a nurse. And after four years of juggling homework and motherhood, she failed her nursing exam. She told me, “I felt a total swell of relief when I read that I had failed. Everyone around me felt sorry for me, and I was actually…happy. My husband had wanted to move to a homestead and I thought he was crazy, but then I found myself with all this knowledge and a garden. And now I’m growing my own medicines, making tinctures and salves, homeschooling my kids and so grateful that I failed that test!”
I was so inspired by these stories. And I heard so many more just like them. There just was no question in what God was trying to teach me.
A few days later we packed up our van and set out for Colorado. Just a half an hour up the highway we stopped for gas in Franklin, TN. After filling up, Rory turned the key and…nothing. Our dear blue van was dead. He tried a few more times and sat back in his seat, the children all silent. At that very moment, a tow truck drove right in front of us and parked along the curb of the gas station. “I’m going to go talk to that guy…” I said.
That guy turned out to be a super helpful and wonderful man who did indeed tow our van to a shop nearby. Which left us stranded at a gas station with all of our overnight gear. I called a friend back in Columbia—I had her phone number because Hattie was always hanging out with her daughter at the festival. “We’re stuck in Franklin. Any chance you could come pick us up and bring us back to Columbia for the night?” She was there in 30 minutes and when she opened her back hatch to pop the back seats up she lifted a floor mat and found our newsletter hidden there from a year ago. We laughed at the coincidence. And then she said, “ugh. I’ve had these brand new hiking shoes back here for a year—they will not let me return them and I can’t find anyone who is an 8 ½.” I smiled… “Are you and 8 ½?!! You have to try them on!” And just like Cinderella, it was a perfect fit and I got a new pair of shoes for our after dinner walks.
The Lord’s hand was so near. Even in the midst of all of this upset, he was doing a work on our hearts. Even our kids hearts. How do you teach your kids to trust God when things aren’t going according to plan? I don’t think mere words will suffice. There has to be a showing with your telling.
We got a bonus night at the Feek’s farm, and we ate our ham sandwiches out on the porch and played at the playground. The next morning the shop called and told us our van was fine—they found nothing wrong, and it was running perfectly.
Our friend Brian gave us a ride back to Franklin, suitcases piled high. And as he drove he shared his testimony from the last year. How he had backed his bulldozer into a hole he had dug himself and flipped the whole thing upside down. How the cat scan on his head revealed no damage from the accident, but instead two brain tumors. How the morning they went in to remove the tumors he woke with inexplicable peace. He had set his music to play calming instrumental, which it had done all night long, but then at 5am, lyrics began to play from the song Peace. He said he went into the pre-op room with an overwhelming assuredness—not at the outcome, but that he was in God’s hands. It was so palpable he later came to find out that both nurses helping him left the room multiple times crying, feeling the presence of the Lord. His story went on and on—those two nurses are now dear friends whom they pray with. One had just lost her husband to cancer and the other discovered cancer of her own shortly after. And the Lord has knit these families together through this trial.
We loaded back into our van, said a family prayer and the Lord’s prayer and set out for Kansas, hoping our van would survive this next leg of the trip (we still didn’t know why it broke down). We were riding on the high of God’s faithfulness—that He is in all things. We were like new creations. The Lord had done a work in our hearts and our trust in him was so strong. We stayed with the Child’s, newsletter readers and friends who came to last year’s Grovestead Gathering, pulling up their lane at 12:58am. They were all awake and acted like our arrival time was normal and totally fine.
In the morning they had a full breakfast for us: sheep’s milk and sheep’s cream for the coffee, an egg bake with a million good things in it, ham, blueberry muffins and granola bars. We feasted and I had the massive epiphany that the way to eat real food on a road trip is to opt out of the industrial system of hotels and food chains and get back into homes. We felt filled up in every way—in friendship and good conversation, in vitamins and nutrition that our bodies were craving, in getting a good night’s sleep in the comfort of a home.
We set back out, barreling across the prairie and made it to the Denver Marriott for the Rocky Mountain Homeschool Conference with our van behaving perfectly the whole time.
But this was only part one of the story. I know that’s shocking, given the many words you just read. But it gets better.
Or maybe worse. But then it gets better again. Because the Lord is in all things.
