“Where are we?” I groggily asked Jordan, my vision still blurry.
“Still in the same place.”
“WHAT?! You mean we haven’t moved?!” I was wide awake this time. I sat up straight as my morning sleepiness gave way to alertness. I pushed aside the curtains to peer outside.
Yep. We haven’t moved at all.
My heart sank.
We were in a large bus filled with people all going to one place. To the city called Xia Pu.
I tried to stretch in my cramp bus seat, careful not to accidentally hit the passengers behind me. Jordan and I have been on the bus since noon yesterday. What was supposed to be a simple 5-hour trip became a snail-paced-20-plus-hours-bus ride.
I sneaked a look at my brother. He was looking at the situation outside with concern. It was dawn.
I remembered how happy we were just two days ago. His face was glowing with the same excitement that I felt when he showed me the newly bought-bus tickets. Jordan’s friend, Lily, was getting married that week, and a short trip to Xia Pu to attend her wedding seemed a delightful prospect.
‘How different we must feel right now,’ I thought.
I have often heard of stories about traffic jams so terrible that some people even have picnics at the side of the road. ‘What a bunch of exaggeration’, I often thought.
That day, as I looked at the situation outside, I wanted to kick myself for not believing those stories. I was living it! For every hour, the bus only moved about a foot. In the end, people started leaving the bus one by one.
My desperation and hopelessness grew each passing hour. I tried not to show, but inside I was wailing to Him like a little girl, “I wanna go home. Father, please let there be a miracle. Like the parting of the Red Sea, let there be a parting of cars. I believe in You!”
Alas, no such miracle happened.
I looked around me. I hadn’t eaten breakfast. The only food we had was a pack of dried fruit and unwashed apples. Our water was running out.
We finally decided to leave the bus and hire a motorcycle driver to take us out of the traffic. I looked back behind me. It was like the movie ‘Day After Tomorrow’ where everyone was rushing to leave the city but all their cars were left behind because of the horrid traffic. The only thing missing was there was no monstrous wave of sea water rushing to consume us.
We traveled through muddy roads. There were signs of mudslides. No wonder the cars couldn’t get through. It was absolutely impassable. It was the result of the typhoon that had been besetting that part of China for the past couple of days. Later, we found out that hundreds of people had died. And we were living out the results of the natural disaster…floods, damaged roads, collapsed bridges, lost lives…
The Creator said that He sees our hearts, all our secret motives and unspoken thoughts. That morning, I wasn’t even thinking of the agony of those whose family had died in the flood. All I thought was my own discomfort. ‘Why? Why? Why oh why did You ever let us come on this trip???’
Everything seemed so unreal, like we were in a movie where everything seemed to get worse and worse.
As I got down from the motorcycle, I felt a searing pain down my lower leg. I looked down in horror as I realized I had burned my leg against the vehicle’s exhaust pipe. I looked at my burn in horror. The vain part of me cried out, “Oh no! My leg! Waaaah! I won’t be able to wear skirts anymore!!!!” Meanwhile, the childish part of me whimpered, “I want my Daddy, I want my Mommy! Waaaahhhhh….”
From the motorcycle, we had to take a taxi before we could reach Xia Pu. When we did get off, it was right in front of a pharmacy. I knew it wasn’t a coincidence that the taxi driver dropped us of there; that the owner was a very warm man who knew exactly how to treat my burn wound. I knew it was His hand moving, His way of taking care of me, but I was too angry with Him to even appreciate Him.
Jordan’s friend, Lily personally picked us up at the pharmacy. I looked at her and tried to smile, but inside I was blaming her, ‘If only you didn’t invite us to your wedding, we wouldn’t be here in the first place… Sniff, sniff…’
Jordan asked her in surprise, “Lily! Aren’t you supposed to be with your husband? How was the wedding this morning?”
Lily gave us a sheepish look. “Actually,” she said, “the wedding was postponed because my fiancé was unable to leave because of the traffic.”
I thought, “Hmph! Even her fiancé didn’t come! So why did we have to come?”
Lily brought us home to her house where her family greeted us warmly and happily. Lily’s parents are wonderful, and generous people. Even though their house was simple and unimpressive compared to the newer apartments in the bigger city, it was abundant with love and much gratefulness to God.
Even with my ungrateful heart, I realized I have never encountered such hospitality before. They even let us stay in their own master bedroom while they slept in their library. No matter how much Jordan insisted on transferring to the smaller room, they wouldn’t hear of it. They not only welcomed us, strangers, into their house, but they loved us and took care of us as if we were their own family. In the end, we ended up staying there for 3 days. We were able to attend the postponed wedding of Lily and soon left through a different bus route that safely brought us home.
Looking back…
During this trip, it seemed like He had been sitting on His hands, doing nothing the whole time. But it turned out He was trying to teach me, “I can easily give you miracles if I want to. That would be very easy for Me to do. But if I did that, what will it teach you? How can you grow? And how can you develop traits which you can only learn through struggles?”
Romans 5:3-4:
“We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials,
for we know that they are good for us—they help us learn to endure.
And endurance develops strength of character in us…”
I’m not proud of what went on inside my heart. If not for this situation, I would probably have gone on believing that I’m a “good” person. So I believe this situation was another opportunity for Him to show me the true conditions of my heart—still full of sin, still needs lots of work. But I should rejoice in this because it means He hasn’t given up on working on me no matter how stubborn I may be.
Thank You, Lord. I would be lost without You.