I hate snow.  Really.  The only way I enjoy snow is on a pretty picture post card.  I spent 6 years in northern Utah, and 4 years in eastern Washington, and had snow enough to last me a lifetime.  One of the things I like about being now in WESTERN Washington, at the bottom of Puget Sound, is that we can go entire winters without getting a single flake.  Most years that we do get snow, we get a maybe an inch or two that lasts for a day or two, once or twice the whole winter.  Then there are the other years.

We’ve had a bit of snow – a few inches – the last few days.  Big, fat, fluffy flakes came down thick yesterday morning for some time, but had turned to rain in the afternoon so most main streets were pretty bare and parking lots were fields of slush puddles.  Last night, however, a major storm moved in.  We were warned to expect up 11-14 INCHES here in Olympia, with total growing less as you move toward Seattle, about 60 miles north.  Travel advisories.  School closures.  State offices closed, workers telecommuting.  Only idiots and the desperate would go out in something like this.  (We don’t have as much snow equipment to handle it – plows, de-icers, etc. – like places that regularly get snow do, so it really is more of an issue.  Besides the fact that the vast majority of western Washingtonians freak out at the mere thought of driving on s-s-s-s-s-now.)  So, naturally, it was THIS morning that I had to have my cousin, Marie, up to Seattle by 9:30 for a crucial medical appointment.   Idiot or desperate?  Not sure there’s a difference!  This is the story of our dash through the snow.

Before leaving, I prayed, “Lord, please get us there.”  The drive to the side street to Marie’s apartment complex at 6:45 was a breeze, since main roads and the freeway had been plowed not too long before.  The side road, and the drive through the complex, however, had not seen a plow since the whole thing began.  Snow was easily already at least 8″ high.  I followed a set of tracks someone had already driven through.  Got Marie in the car.  Tried to back out the way I’d come in…. and was stuck!  Tried digging out the wheels, rocking it, etc.  All the usual tricks for snow.  Nothing.  “Lord, you got me this far.  Please don’t let it end here.  Send someone to help.”  In my rearview, I saw a figure, snow shovel in hand approaching down the drive!

I got out to greet him, and explained WHY I was out in that snow.  Jay is a maintenance worker with the complex, and he promised he’d get me out, whatever it took.  After working for 10 minutes, though, he had made little progress.   “Lord, either let this work, or send someone else to help!”  Another figure approached, this time a resident who’d heard the noise.  Together, it took them another 20 minutes or more, but they did it.  God bless them!!!!  By 7:30, Marie and I were on the freeway headed north.

For the first nearly 20 miles, it was just snow driving, which is pretty easy.  Visibility was good, no one was being stupid, things were fine.  Then the snow on the road turned into thick, mushy slush, at least 6″ deep.  If you’ve never driven on it, let me tell you that driving in that is MUCH, much harder than on just nice, dry snow.  Mostly, you just try to choose one set of  tracks and follow them.  Sometimes, though, there aren’t any clear tracks through a patch.  Then you lose traction, and you can be forced hither and yon following whichever way has the most “give” to it.  Hit a place where one set of wheels has traction and the other one suddenly doesn’t…. and you can find yourself in a spin out.  You don’t have to be going very fast!  You’re in the spin before you know it.  Oh, yeah.  Spun all the way from the left of the freeway across two other lanes to bump the front left corner of the car into the center barrier, coming to a stop at a 45 degree angle backwards to the oncoming traffic, but with just a bit of the tail sticking into the lane.  Amazing what prayers can go up in that time.  I don’t coherently remember them, but I know they were going.  No one hit us.  Everyone went around us, except this one little car that stopped in that near lane.  I waited for it to move so I could maneuver more to the side, maybe turn a 360 if aI got a gap, when he flipped on his lights.  Oooh, highway patrol, I get it.  I got out, took a look at my front end, and shrugged my shoulders.  The cop looked back to the road, and there was no more traffic for a MILE behind us.  He grinned, told me to just back up in a U-turn and be on my way then!  The whole thing took less than a minute.  “Thank you, thank you, thank you….”  repeat repeat repeat

Roads got even nastier toward Seattle, but we made it.  (more “Thank you s”)  Got off onto city streets.  Had to climb about 7 blocks of a stiff hill to get to the medical building – and had green lights at all the right places, and reds only where it wasn’t a problem to stop.  2 hours drive time, which is pretty good for what would normally have been about an hour fifteen.  I dropped Marie off at the patient drop/pick up, got back in the car, had a mini-sob session, and went to park.  When we were done with the appointment, I got a suggestion from the doctor for a different way to go when we left that didn’t involve going back DOWN that hill.  This time, too, the lights were always with us, all the way to the freeway.  (More “Thank you s”.  He got a lot of those today.)

Roads outbound were even worse than they’d been, for the first 15 miles, with the last being about terrifying, with not one, but TWO, misses-by-inches of big pick-up trucks barreling past us, slewing this way and that in the slush.  (I kept a smile on my face for Marie’s sake and was inwardly, um, “crying out” to the Lord, shall we say?  Something like a white-eyed, pee your pants “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!”)  Then, for about 30 miles, we had bare, wet pavement with slush only down the middle and between lanes.  Glorious!  What a relief!  Then the last 15 miles of the trip…  Ever sit in one of those vibrating massage chairs at the fair?  The kind that sorta make your teeth feel like they’re going to rattle out?  Well, we hit slush again, but this time over FROZEN, chain-chewed-up ice!  It wasn’t slick, but oh, my goodness, was it rough – and say goodbye to any sense of real control of where you were going!  You just followed the ruts, no matter where they wandered.  (I wonder if my prayers vibrated as much as our voices did if we tried to talk?)  But we made it back to Olympia in about the same time it took the other way!  I stopped at our house and picked up Rob and a snow shovel, unsure what we’d find back at Marie’s apartment complex, but Rob was able to pull in and back right out.  (Yet another “Thank you!”)  Got poor Marie back to her apartment and us back home.  I think none of us are budging again until this snow is GONE!

Now, the fact that God got me to Marie’s didn’t mean He was obligated to get me back out.  Even the fact that He sent people to HELP didn’t obligate Him to let it be successful.  The fact that He got me out didn’t mean He was obligated to keep us from spinning out on the way.  The fact that He kept us safe in that spin out didn’t mean He was obligated to get us to Seattle.  The fact that He got us to Seattle didn’t mean He was obligated to get us to the medical building.  The fact that He got us there, didn’t mean He had to ….  You get the idea.

I know a lot of people who would talk about this trip and say something like, “It was just so obvious that God was with you!”  But I can’t say that.  That is, yes, He WAS with us – but He would have been just  as much with us if at any of those points, things had gone another way!   Some would say, “Wow!  God really answered our prayers!”  But I can’t say that.  That is, yes, He DID answer our prayers – but He would have been answering our prayers just as much if had things gone differently, for, at heart, our prayers are essentially all “Thy will be done”, aren’t they?  And it always is!  I admit it’s easier to be thankful when things go all “cool” like they did this trip, but we should always be just as ready to accept the difficult as the easy from His hand.

All day I’ve had a rhyme going through my head that a friend taught me years ago.  “Has He taught us to love Him and call on His name/And thus far has brought us – but to put us to shame?”  It’s a rhetorical question, of course.  No matter what happens to us, whether the trip goes well or we spin out, we get hit or we escape, His purposes are always good.  He will never put us to shame.

Now (my snow-loving friends, forgive me) I hope He’ll take away this dashed snow….