Do you want to hear an amazing story?
After finishing breakfast and packing our things we headed off to the airport with little time to spare. Wade made a comment on how professional Jai looked in his safari shirt - like a police official. We were on the road and praising God for all the wonderful work He had done over the past 2 weeks.
All of a sudden the traffic comes to a complete stop. We wait for a while and the cars in front of us do not move . . . at all! So we turn around and weave our way to the side road that parallels the highway (but so did everyone else it seemed). We quickly discovered that we were stuck with nowhere to go. No one was moving and there was no way out.
So Jai, my big Indian brother, jumped out of the car to find out what was going on. Sam calls the airline and the flight is on time. If we miss this flight to Chennai, we will not connect with our international flights and we will have a to stay another day, change our tickets, find a hotel . . . We all start praying, but there is no way we are going to make it through. I call Erin and told her to start praying and that it did not look good for us. I thought that by now, only a mighty miracle would get us to the airport on time.
Well, we soon discover that 50 women are protesting against the local government and having a “sit-in” on the road until their demands are met. There is a huge crowd, the drivers are getting mad, people are shouting and the situation is getting intense. Jia tries to reason with the crowd (by yelling) that there are some important foreigners trying to get through. Many of them move aside and a few cars get by, so he headed back to our car.
But as soon as he left, the opening closed and we were still too deep in the queue. So he headed back to the crowd and I guess a few guys joined him. “These foreigners must get through!” Jai said in his shirt, looking quite official. Then another man says that an ambulance is trying to come through and that the foreigners were going to the hospital. Then someone said their was an oxygen mask on one of us, or something like that. The story took off from there. Back at the car, we were praying like crazy!
Jai said all of a sudden, the final five women got up and moved out of the way, but the crowd began to fill the street as a few other cars moved through. We could now see Jai screaming at a number of others in the crowd. They tried to seal off the road again, but he held them back with one arm and waved us through with the other. A couple guys were holding back the rest of the crowd. It was a very intense scene and we avoided making eye contact with any of them so as not to added fuel to their fire. We somehow “squeezed” through! Jai yelled at us to keep moving and he ran after us, caught up to us and jumped in as we sped away. Praise the Lord we were going to make it!
We arrived with only a few minutes to go, only to discover that I had bought our tickets for the next day. Can you believe it? So now we had to run back outside and book new tickets. I was confirming that they would not leave without us, Wade was taking luggage through the scanner and Sam began to negotiate on the cancellation fees with the airlines (you negotiate on everything here.)
We said our goodbyes quickly and then headed off to the plane. I am not sure how it all worked, but somehow our flight ended up being 22 minutes late, and we made it! As I look back at the entire situation, it was nothing short of a miracle.
Praise God for His goodness to us today, our Indian brothers and Jai's shirt.
I am now on my way home to see my family! Thanks for your continued prayers. In Christ - Jeff
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