God's Great Mercy!

This weekend, we Cunninghams once more experienced God's great mercy towards us.

For a few months, our van had been giving us some trouble, with it worsening particularly in the last few weeks. We finally figured out that it was likely a transmission problem, but Mom and Dad decided to take it to the shop on Monday. On Saturday (the 10th, three days before our original shop plan), we decided to go to Ikea in Atlanta to get Seth's much-belated birthday present. Ikea is a neat furniture/ home store in northern Atlanta, and it generally has spartan styles. It also has little demonstrations of how you can fit an entire apartment into a space about as big as Seth's bedroom. We five had a good time looking around, trying out chairs and couches (with often humorous results) and picking up a few odd things, including a new dresser for Seth.

As we pulled out of the parking garage to go home, the transmission started acting up. Because of Atlanta's poor design, we had to take the long way to get to the highway, so we took Northside Drive. Northside Drive is a pretty, forested road, but it has a lot of hills; our poor van became very sluggish, going no more than 20- 30 mph. By now, we were all praying that we could just get to the highway, as the van would do much better on a straight, flatter surface. Finally, we got to I-75, but we pulled the van into a parking lot, as we didn't think we could make it home. Dad almost called someone to get us, but eventually he decided to try and get the van back to the house; if we left the van in the lot, then we would've had to pay a pretty penny to get it back to our county. Still praying, we got onto the highway. Traffic wasn't as bad, and we didn't run into any significant problems. When we got onto the road which our neighborhood is off of, the van started acting up again; but, God be praised, we got it safely onto our driveway. We were all frazzled after we got home, but we were all so thankful for God's mercy to us. Our van could have died in Northside Drive or on the highway, but it miraculously ran long enough to get us home.

Our van's been repaired now and is running just fine, but it's a testimony of God's goodness towards His people.