A Tale of Two Minivans

I promised a blog post on the subject of the two vans sitting in our driveway, so here it goes.

Two years ago, when we were preparing to make the move to Orlando, we found an affordable green '98 Ford Windstar (thanks, Mollie and Steve!).  This van has been good to us, though we've had a love/hate relationship at times.  One time, I ended up walking 5 miles home from the shop because of the rusted out brake line on what our mechanic affectionately calls a "Yankee bucket of bolts"...okay, he only calls it a Yank, but I'm reading between the lines.  He routinely brings his proteges around to gawk at the underbelly of the van so that they can see it's exotic salt and rust damage.  You think I'm joking. 

Living 30 min. from work, I've become accustomed to carpooling (thanks to all my trusty chauffeurs!), but every so often, I'll need to take the van and leave Sarah stranded at home with the girls.  For a year now, we've assumed that it will eventually kick the bucket, or at least be not-so-worth-fixing.  A few months ago, we started trying to save up a little at a time to buy a more reliable option, especially with another potential move for our family next year (more on that later).  Nothing fancy or expensive, but a decent car or van to take on road trips would be nice!

Then we got stuck on a mountain in Tennessee in the middle of a snowstorm with our van, which was actually a champ, considering the situation!  While on a lovely vacation with Sarah's family, I got a fairly random voicemail from Ryan, a friend here in Orlando.  He said that he heard about a friend of the family that was wanting to...get this...give away a minivan.  As I heard the description of said minivan, the "coincidences" kept piling up. 

1998.  Got it.

Ford.  Check.

Windstar.  This is getting weird.

110,000 miles.  Bonus!  Our current '98 Windstar has close to 200, 000.

So I called this mysteriously generous gent thinking, "there's no way this is for real...something's gotta be wrong here."  Sure enough, when I talked to Shaun on the phone, I got the whole story.  First, some more odd similarities:

"The passenger window doesn't roll down...The automatic locks are funky...The rear heat and A/C control is schizo...The door pretends to be ajar and dings whilst driving under 16 miles per hour."  Check, check, check, and, yes, check.  We've learned to live with these oddities and laugh them off before.  No big deal.  We're missionaries, right?  Isn't this sort of what we do?

Then:


"Transmission slippage."  Ugh.  That's gonna cost. 

"But wait!  There's more!  If you take this free minivan off our hands, we'll throw in one thousand dollars!  We've had the damage appraised, and that should cover it."  I think at this point I chuckled out loud.  It may have even been a guffaw.  Surely this couldn't be happening to us!  Not even family would give us a deal this good!  It turns out that this awesome clan had been able to get two brand new vehicles with money left to them with a death in the family, so they wanted to give their old van to a family who needed it.  By grace alone, we had become the chosen family.

Several phone calls and trips to the DMV later, we had the van in our driveway.  Praise the Lord!  To make a very long story relatively short, we were able to get the transmission fixed for much less than projected AND patched up a newly sprung brake line leak on our old van.  It's so weird to state all of this in a few sentences because this has been one of those wildly dramatic rides that kept us completely speechless along several points of the journey.  I mean, really, God is fantastic at wowing us! 

Oooooh, oooooh!  And what's my favorite feature on the van?  I'm glad you asked!  We got a built in VHS Player!!!!!!!!  Seriously.  Is there anything more exciting than that?  

Each step of this story had more twists and turns than a Ted Dekker novel, and we'd love to tell them all.  But I'll spare you the details.  Needless to say, our God is great and greatly to be praised! 

Currently, our "new" van (The Miracle Mini) is being used by some good friends in Orlando on furlough from Nigeria until Thursday.  The best thing about being given a blessing is to pass it on to others.  I must admit, though, I'm excited to start driving it around, because the girls haven't even taken a ride around the block in it yet.  It's sort of become a "stone of remembrance" for our family, which is also awesome.  Every time I see it, I'm reminded of God's faithfulness.  And His humor, too.

-posted by Trevor, the belated blogger.