Traveling Mercies & God’s Protection

by Dave Kahle

           Does God really care for me?  How do I know?  Those are two questions that Christians often ask. One way to answer them is to reflect on the occasions when God has intervened in our lives.  I recently had an occasion to share a series of events in my life that I labeled as ‘traveling mercies.’  In this post, I’m sharing that series of Godly interventions in my life, all having to do with travel. 

The Campground

           My wife and I took our four children on a camping trip to Mammoth caves.  One night, we stayed in a campground near Knoxville, Tennessee.  Our four kids, ages 6- 10, wanted to explore the campground while Coleen and I set up the tent.  We told them to stay inside the campground and let them go. An hour passed and they weren’t back.  Worried, we searched through the campground, and couldn’t find them.    We started to panic. 

           Then I noticed, on the state route outside the campground, a car driving very slowly down the road, and our kids walking next to the car.  It seems that a barking dog had scared them into running down the road.  They got lost.  An elderly lady spotted them and asked if she could help. Since they were told never to get into a car with a stranger, they wouldn’t let her drive them back to the campground.  So, she had them walk next to the car, and slowly drove them back to the campground. Later, I realized that God had sent that lady to us when we were in a bind traveling.  It was the first of many similar occasions where God sent someone to help in a tense travel situation.

Angels in Detroit

           My wife and I as well as Kelly, our youngest daughter, had spent the weekend in Windsor and were driving to the airport in Detroit on a Monday afternoon.  They were going to drop me off at the airport, where I would take a flight to a speaking engagement, and then continue home to Grand Rapids.  It was rush hour on i-94 in Detroit and we were headed west toward the airport.

           I was in the middle of three lanes. I noticed a flatbed truck exiting on the right a bit in front of us. As he entered the exit ramp, he slammed on his brakes and the trailer jackknifed and slid across the freeway, I was able to get into the far-left lane, but the trailer hit us in the right rear and slammed us into the cement wall in the median. We rolled up a hundred yards or so and came to a stop.  The trailer had settled perpendicular to the flow of traffic, cutting off all three lanes of traffic behind us.  Coleen and Kelly were both upset and appeared injured.   I was OK but was disoriented.  I wasn’t sure what to do, after calling 911. 

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           Then, in the confusion, a couple of nurses showed up.  One was black and one was white, and they were still in hospital scrubs.  One had a stethoscope in her pocket. They attended to Coleen and Kelly, calming everyone down.  An ambulance then showed up, having come the wrong way on the freeway to get to us.  We loaded Coleen and Kelly in the ambulance, and I sat in the front with the driver, and set out for Henry Ford Hospital ER.   Kelly was attended to in the pediatric ER, and Coleen in the adult unit.  I went back and forth between the two.    It turned out that neither had serious injuries.

           But, as I was talking to Coleen about it, we both began thinking about the two nurses.  While in the heat of things we didn’t pay much attention, now we wondered how they could have gotten there.   They could not have come from the backed-up traffic behind us, as we would have seen them coming.  They couldn’t have come from the other side of the freeway as they would have to cross three lanes of rush hour traffic. The exit was blocked off by the jackknifed truck, so they couldn’t have come that way.  They couldn’t’ have come from the side of the freeway, as the freeways in Detroit are below ground level and fenced off. All at once it dawned on us. We both had the same realization.  They were angels, sent by God to care for us in a time of great need.

Broken down in Nashville

           In the days that we were snowbirds, spending the summers in Grand Rapids and the winters in Sarasota, I was driving with our dog and a packed trailer from Michigan to Florda. On Friday at rush hour, in Nashville, I noted that something seemed wrong with the brake lights.  Since we had driven about 10 hours that day, it seemed like a good time to get off the freeway and stop for the night.

           I exited the freeway and pulled into the first motel I found.  They would not let me stay with the dog, so I set out to find another.  But the car would not shift out of park.  The transmission had seized up.  I called AAA and after about an hour of broken connections and busy tow companies they finally hooked me up with a towing company that would tow both the car and the trailer.  It was now about 7 PM on Friday night. 

           A few minutes later, a tow truck showed up and Manny, the driver, introduced himself.  He immediately saw what the situation was and told me not to worry, he could see that I was having a really bad day, and he would take.... CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE

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