Teach Your Children To Be Afraid

Good Morning,
You may not know this about me but I am a grandmother of 16 grandchildren. They are all unique and fun to be with and I love them with all of my heart. Both my husband and I pray about their safety and their well being on a daily basis. This week something happened that allowed me to understand more fully the importance of prayer. Because of this I thought I would tell you what happened with a chance email and how it may have protected the lives of a family living in Bolivia.

Earlier in the week, a person I have known for several years, but who seldom sends me emails, sent me an email with an attachment that included pictures of a highway in Bolivia built on the side of an enormously tall mountain range. The series of pictures showed a dirt road that was so narrow that two small trucks would have difficulty passing one another without one of the trucks falling into the 1,000 foot canyon below. There were about 10 picturesque images of the mountain range and the tunnels that were carved out of the mountains. They were beautiful and terrifying all at the same time. The pictures showed in detail the extremely treacherous nature of the highway. The one that made me sickest was the one with small buses filled with people being crowded to the edge of the abyss by trucks loaded with goods. It was scarey to look at on the computer and I decided to never again travel across any Oregon coastal bridges without closing my eyes. I forwarded the email to my daughter, as a curiosity, and promptly pushed the scarey images to the back of my mind.

Later in the day, my daughter, sent me an email telling me that she had forwarded the email to a friend of hers who is teaching in Bolivia and made the comment in the subject line, 'Your Commute to Work'. The comment in the subject line caught the attention of her friend and she opened it immediately. It appears that the friends in Bolivia had actually been planning a trip along the same highway for the next week! They had planned a weekend adventure on the basis of viewing one picture of the road and thought how fun it would be for them to travel over one of the world's most narrow and steep highways. When they viewed the attached email pictures they realized that they might be getting invovled with an adventure that could potentially be life threatening. They began to ask questions of friends and acquantainces about the road and found out that not only is it extremely dangerous but the highway is also frequented by bandits! They immediately decided to cancel their planned highway adventure and asked my daughter to forward thanks to the woman who originally sent the email.

The lessons I have learned from this experience are two fold. The first is that God does work in mysterious ways and the second is that prayers are often answered quickly and in the most miraculous ways. I am so grateful for this.

As an addendum, I relearned the importance of teaching your children to be violently afraid of heights, snakes, and things that go bump in the night!

Take care,
Az