To be honest, I can't remember what happened this week... Elder Fraire and I were talking this morning about how P-Days are really the only day that keep your mind on track. Every day feels like a Sunday, so the question is always, "which Sunday is it today??"
The work in our area has been going great lately! I was telling my mission president earlier in my letter how I don't feel worthy of the success we are having in our area. I then realized that, "I'm exactly right! I'm not even CLOSE to being worthy of all of these miracles happening in our area, but his children seeking the truth definitely do deserve to hear this message..." I have been continually amazed at how great of an opportunity I have been given to witness people change their lives. I have seen people be shunned by their families, families sacrificing meals to go to church, and just so much faith in these people. Elder Fraire and I have only been able to proselyte in our area Saturdays and Sundays, but the work Heavenly Father is doing while we are not there is making up the difference. It's so humbling to think that Heavenly Father trusts all of us imperfect people to carry out his perfect work. So cool.
We had quite the adventure up in Sagay again! I know I sent a lengthy message about Sagay last week, but interesting things keep happening up there! Here's what I wrote in my journal.
--
Today we had even MORE driving experiences... We have one truck that has had problems in the past that have since been "fixed" so we decided to take it our on a drive, seeing as we hadn't really given it a full test run in along time. Both of us felt pretty confident in it as we had taken it on small errands around Bacolod. About ten minutes into the drive, Elder Fraire said, "Yeah!! This thing feels like it's back to life!" I agreed. It did feel better. But then I quickly countered with, "We better stop talking about this, I feel like these words will come back to bite us..." Then we laughed and kept going.
Upon our arrival in Sagay we noticed smoke started coming out of the hood... "Dang it..." we both thought. We stopped at the church and investigated. We took one look at the billowing smoke coming from the engine and instantly knew, "Okay...well.. I know for sure that this definitely isn't a GOOD thing..." We decided to move it down the street a bit to the Sister's house where there was shade and water. After further investigation, we noticed the coolan reservoir had no more water. Bone dry. So we got a couple pitchers-full of water and dumped it in. Steam immediately started coming out of the opening and a boiling sound started happening. After we let it cool for a length of time, we started it and it turned right over! When we looked at the water reservoir, we saw the liquid shooting out the bottom quite rapidly. "I guess that's why there's no water in the reservoir..." After contemplating and considering our options, we decided to bring a bunch of one liter coke bottles with us and just keep dumping water in the rest of the way home. So, off we went!
The whole way home, I was trying my very best to keep the motor running pretty low in order to keep it from getting unnecessarily hot. No hard accelerations or anything. About 30 minutes in, we stopped to throw some more water in. Elder Fraire went to the bathroom, I put the water in , and we were off. Everything seemed TOTALLY fine when I checked, so we just kept going! Another 45 minutes to an hour goes by - I'm driving, he's fast asleep - and all of the sudden I got a horrible feeling in my stomach that said, "Pull over!" I ignored it of course because it seemed perfectly fine earlier, but after the persistence of the feeling, I decided to obey. As we were pulling over, just as the car had done earlier when we arrived at the Sister's apartment, the engine cut out and the car turned off. We stopped, smoke poured out, and the same thoughts went through my head... "Shoot..." I got out, flipped up the hood and immediately threw water in. We waited ten minutes to see if anything would happen - nothing. Car wouldn't start. A few guys, one without a shirt, ended up walking up to us to help. They just kind of watched me as I was dumping some water in to it. I figured they were probably afraid to speak English, so as they stared at me putting the water in, I said, "yeah, this thing's pretty thirsty," and then they laughed and realized I spoke Ilonggo. They took a look and asked if we had anymore water. I went and got the few liters we had left and we just dumped them in. They were equally as confused as we were, but one of them told us that we were almost at Silay and that we should just try and get it to Bacolod as fast as we could manage without over heating too much. We waited for the engine to cool more, turned the key, and the engine surprisingly started struggling back to life. It eventually turned over and we were all happy. We headed off, worried, but comforted by their reassurance. All we knew is that we needed to get there FAST.
Apparently it was our lucky day because when we got to Silay, they decided to have an unannounced parade... As we were crawling through traffic, I kept saying, "Come on, people! This thing is exploding!!" Not two seconds later, mid-merge, the engine DIES. "NO. WAY." Blocking two lanes of traffic, I desperately turned the key to bring it back. It fired right back up! What a relief! But now we knew that we were on super limited time. Then followed some of the most aggressive, yet least accelerative driving patterns that I have ever laid forth in my life. As we got to Bacolod, everyone was going slower than I had ever seen there. They were crawling... Traffic would be the death of this vehicle, I just knew it. We were so pleased to see little whisps of smoke eventually start flowing out from under the hood. At this point it's safe to say that I was not a happy driver. Everyone was now an enemy. A guy on a motorcycle even came by and pointed at our car hood, essentially meaning to me, "umm, hey sir, your car is SMOKING..?" I replied with an expression and motioned towards the cars in front of me that clearly expressed, "If these 'wonderful' cars in front of me would just MOVE..." He laughed and left. Everything got worse the closer we got to the office. Mid-U-turn, the engine cuts out again, I turn it back on, smoke is streaming right on out of there, and the engine is kicking like a bull. And the bull was not happy. We pulled into the office, me keeping the RPM's high enough to keep it from dying until I finally got it parked. No need to turn it off because it killed itself! I'm not sure if we destroyed the engine or what, but we just threw the hood open and went inside. It was quite the experience. As people came into the office a few minutes after, they started asking what happened. "Hey elders, why is the car smoking?" Not wanting to explain the whole ordeal we had just gone through, we just said, "Oh yeah it broke..."
--
Normally, I would pull an analogy out of this story, but I don't quite have a solid one today... It was just a good story :) I'm sure we could find all sorts of stories about being more prepared and stuff like that here, but I will leave that up to you all. I DO know, however, that I had a prompting from the Spirit to stop when and where I did. Perhaps it something bad was to have happened to us later down the road. As I have pondered that prompting since then, I have imagined collisions and loss of control and all of the horrible things that might have happened had I not listened. But there's also a chance that I was meant to stop there simply to plant a very, VERY small seed for one of those men that stopped to help us. The very short conversation we had about the church, talking about who we were, and maybe even just the simple interaction we had, may have been just enough to plant a seed that will grow forth in the future. I may never know why I stopped there, but I know that I will never regret NOT following it.
Have a great week!
No comments :
Post a Comment