Thursday, August 02, 2007

Difficult tale of praise

I spent last weekend with two of our other volunteers packing up the Hilltop camp in Bayou La Batre, Alabama. If you went this summer, you'd be amazed at how empty and quite the park is now. Only squares of dead (but recovering) grass remain in the space where hundreds of volunteers lived while serving that community the last two months.

The gear is all being stored in Virginia where June and Rick White can maintain it and prepare vehicles for the next hurricane we will respond to. We drove my newly purchased Ford Excursion diesel down to tow the 30' shower trailer to Virginia and hit the road Saturday afternoon. We also had the 3 king kids who were riding up with us to visit the New Life Canal Winchester team who had worked on their house. After a couple hours we switched drivers and a few miles down the road I leaned over on my pillow to go to sleep.

I felt the truck start pitching back and forth. The trailer had started swaying in increasing oscillations which eventually pushed us into the Median of the highway. The truck rolled completely over landing on it's wheels in the oncoming fast lane, but there were no vehicles coming at us. The shower trailer rolled 3/4 of the way over and was laying in the median.

We all walked out. God protected the 6 of us from a horrific rollover and the only injuries were one broken arm (Alex King) and some glass cuts. We are so thankful that He loves us and chose to save us from death and serious injury that we would all expect to have been the outcome of this accident.

Alex's arm was set and cast successfully Tuesday morning and our cuts and scrapes are healing up. While Ursula has no interest in attempting another road trip, the boys both are still eager to come up for a visit. I suggested Christmas break when they may see some snow.

We praise the Lord in this for our health and everyone's attitude and response. This could have been a major tragedy, but has been (as disaster relief always is) quite an adventure.