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So, anyone up for the rest of my camp week story?

How can I top my last story of driving to camp the wrong day?? -chronicled *here* in painful detail...I'll wait till you get back, really....

I'm going to try to make this short and sweet, since it still pains me.

I drove almost 3 hours, part-way up a mountain, with 3 kids in the backseat-and my logical/linear/near-perfect/engineering husband....

and ran out of gas.

We were on our way for the last day of camp- "show-deo", intent on getting there in time-at the unmentionable ghastly hour of 9 a.m (which meant we had to leave by 6 a.m.)...and about 20 minutes past the last city, the "low on fuel" light came on. I had meant to stop and get gas, but forgot. I was afraid to tell Sky, and so I drove on, thinking that we would run into one of those small, lonely gas stations. We didn't. It got worse and worse. Finally, when the road began the assent, and I knew we would in no-way make it, I told Sky we were out of gas. As in, "I tried all I could think of, now fix it please." (isn't our spiritual life like this, we try on our own efforts to be good or to attain holiness- and then once we've made a complete muddle of it, and our circumstances seem hopeless-we look to God to fix it, somehow?)

Sky actually took it very well-though I could tell he was near panic mode. He had me turn around and head back for the city. It was hopeless, we would never make it back at that point-and we would miss the show and disappoint Meg- I felt physically ill.

We got to a certain point near an Indian casino, where I had looked for a filling station in vain- on the way up..and as we waited at a light and debated trying to take a side road to look for a station, Sky pointed and said, " a station!!"

...the light turned green

and the car died.

We coasted on down the highway, Sky yelling "steer!", crossed the highway into on-coming traffic, coasted up into the driveway and then came to a dead stop. Sky pushed the van the final 5 feet or so.

He filled the tank while I burst into tears.

yes, it was the crowning touch to my rough week..almost.

The next day on the way to Lord's day meeting, I locked my son in the van and walked away.
It was his frantic pounding that alerted me to the, ahem, 'oversight'.

that brought me to tears too, in the meeting as I confessed to Sky my latest escapade.

It was really, only the second time in my whole life that I had run out of gas. Really.

***I'm going to add this on, several months after this post, I was diagnosed as being very, very anemic...one of the symptoms is 'fuzzy thinking'...it was a relief to find out I wasn't losing my mind, the crowning point was me asking Sky nightly, 3 or 4 times in a row if he had locked up our hens for the night, he would tell me yes, I would nod, satisfied and then 10 minutes later ask him again, and then again...

Labels: Jen's world