From Meanderings—Swapping Road Stories with Abraham’s Tour Group. (Published August 1, 2018): Chapter 34

For a touring group/ministry, transportation is critical. The vehicle is not just to faithfully get a group to their next appointment, it is home and sanctuary as well as beast of burden to carry equipment and product. When we were in a distressing vehicular problem, I dreamed we would acquire a bus and we would know it was ours by a red stripe on the sides—front to back. It was a GMC 4106. We prayed that we might find it, have the funds to buy it. In our great need, God had spoken, we believed, it was a done deal, we believed. You would have laughed at us or cried at how pathetic we were. If we met a bus on the Interstate, we would lean out of our van windows looking for a red stripe. We found one in a parking lot in Ohio—bright red stripe. I whipped around the block to claim our bus. Up close the red stripe was the only quality it had. Vision or not, we never owned a GMC 4106. We did own a GMC motorhome with purple stripes. Like all our travel vehicles, it is the source of painful, costly memories.4a

This week I have been rechecking editing before sending the manuscript to the formatter. I lived through those days that can be described as agonizing, fearful, hopeful and tense. Today as I published my blog with a note about the new book, Carole yelled up the stairs:

“Dean! Come down immediately! Hurry!”

On the street outside our kitchen window was a huge tow truck pulling a GMC 4106 with a red stripe on the side. A bus that size or style has never been on our street, let alone one with red stripes. I couldn’t get my head wrapped around what was happening. My brain was buffering. Was it being delivered to us?

I don’t want a bus, have no use for one and couldn’t afford it even if it were a gift. But its presence on our street indicated something odd was going on. I ran out to help them park it on the lot across the street. Didn’t want them to scratch it—just in case.

There it sits. I don’t know if it is there to taunt, haunt or bless us. Carole said, “That damn bus is going to sit there and torment us.” That tells you how serious those days years ago banged on our souls. We did laugh when she said, “It was being towed by a tow truck. That should tell us something.”

After the tow truck left, I walked over to touch it—not unlike the many times I placed my hands on buses to claim them for our ministry. I checked it out like parents look over a newborn. Just being next to the bus felt strange, unexplainable.

I laughed with God because the book Meanderings is about hearing, deciphering and understanding God’s voice and how to interpret it—what God was telling us. All I could say was, “Lord, what is this all about?” There was no parting of the heavens today any more than there was in the long ago.