Of Blowouts and Tunnels

Victory Baptist Church.  For forty years, a lighthouse of truth and Baptist witness to the South Carolina low country.  As its address on Parris Island Gateway would suggest, the church has had a ministry to United States Marines, either active duty or retired, for many years.  For their fortieth anniversary celebration, Pastor Chuck Rice decided to invite two former pastors and Evangelist Paul Crow as guest speakers.  It is impossible for me to speak for the two former pastors.  As for me, my trip to even get settled in at Victory Baptist Church was filled with a little more drama than usual.

It seemed like a good idea at the time: leave south Florida on Friday morning and get in to Beaufort, South Carolina a day early.  A chance for everyone to catch their breath before charging headlong into the next meeting could only be a good thing.  As we headed up I-95 north of Savanna, Georgia, however, we heard a sudden pop and the truck seemed to lose power.  Sarah was able to look in her mirror and saw the tread of one of our brand new tires (purchased earlier this year) come flying off.  We had suffered a blowout.  Not to worry, there was a brand new spare on the back bumper.  There are worse things in this world than changing a flat on the side of the Interstate in the dark with spectators flying past at 70-plus miles per hour while your children contemplate playing chicken.

Still, we arrived safely at Victory Baptist Church after 8:00 Friday night.  Everything was set up and ready to go.  Everything except for one thing.  In our haste to get to South Carolina, we had failed to dump our sewage tanks.  The next morning after some inquiries, we decided to dump the black water straight into the church septic system.  That meant unhooking everything and backing the trailer through a small gate.  Everything about the dumping process was pretty seamless.  No spilled water on the church ground, everything going where it needed to go, no leaky black water hoses—it was perfect.  We then maneuvered the trailer back into the parking space.  Not a problem.

Everything was in place, when I began to jack the trailer up off the truck hitch.  (We are in a borrowed unit right now that is a bumper pull, not a fifth wheel.)  Now the tongue was high enough so that it barely cleared the hitch.  As I walked away from the hitch to go to the cab of the truck and pull it out, a terrible noise sounded behind me.  The trailer had shifted and the tongue had come off the blocks where I had left the jack.  The jack had buried itself in the soft, sandy dirt.  Sarah had been in the trailer, and the sudden jolt gave her quite a fright.

In the end, a bottle jack saved the day and got the trailer back to straight and level.  More importantly, God had spared me from what might have been a dangerous accident.  A 10,000-lb trailer jolting and careening around can be dangerous.  God protected us.

The only other incident that happened was that my children decided to begin a subterranean project of tunneling under the church fellowship hall.  Happily, we discovered the project before too much progress had been made and the workers decided to fill the holes back in.  Hopefully, no one will notice at the big celebration tomorrow.  I know now why we usually make it a policy to arrive at the church on Saturday night.

We look forward to the upcoming meeting with Pastor Rice and Victory Baptist Church.  Thank you all so much for your prayers.