"The Coincidence"

I married my husband for his typewriter. 

I had an old clunky manual typewriter and his nifty Smith-Corona electric typewriter with correcting ribbon looked mighty fine. 

That and his Olympus SLR camera and his cute marine blue Volkswagen Superbeetle named "Feather". 

Oh, how he loved Volkswagens. He loved the look. He loved the smell. He loved the sound. Feather was his pride and joy. 

That pride and joy broke down on numerous occasions and he learned the hard way through the school of hard knocks and no budget for a mechanic the ins and outs of VW repair. 

Breakdown on the way home from our honeymoon

Shortly after Christina's first birthday he announced that we needed a bigger car. I wondered why since we only had one child.

My intuitive hubby overuled his practical wife's objection and traded his beloved VW bug for an equally cherished VW van. 

Oh, how he loved the sight, the sound, and the smell of his VW van. VW van owners do this quirky pinky-thumb wave when they pass each other on the road. 

Immensely proud of our creativity, we named our van "Vincent" after Vincent Van Gogh.

This "new" (to us) van also broke down at regular intervals and Keith further honed his mechanical skills. 

One summer we traveled in our cool, but unreliable van from Portland, Oregon where we lived to Rock Rapids, Iowa where his parents lived. 

While driving around his hometown one day, Keith spotted another VW van. In a state where nine out of ten cars are American, VW vans stick out like a big, fat thumb. 

When my VW-loving hubby discovered the other van's owner wanted to part out his broken down van, Keith jumped on it.

I gave Keith the look. You know, the look that says, "What were you thinking?" Our Daddy-working-himself-through-seminary budget was already stretched thin.

To top it off, we didn't have room in the van to bring the van parts back to Oregon with us. I wasn't happy that we had spent $150 only to leave the parts in Iowa. 

The next summer, we made the long trek from Portland to Iowa again. This time Keith made sure we had room to bring the van parts home with us. 

On the return trip, just west of Cheyenne, Wyoming the van lurched, made a few ominous sounds and quit moving forward. Keith knew right away that the transmission had died. Cheyenne is almost halfway between Oregon and Iowa so no help would come from family or friends. 

This was before cell phones and we couldn't afford a tow truck even if we could call one, so Keith stuck the van in first gear and we limped back to Cheyenne. 

We checked into a Motel 6 where Keith said that he just happened to have a spare transmission along. I went swimming with Christina (3) and Andrew (1) while he dropped the engine in the Motel 6 parking lot and installed his "spare" transmission. 

We got a good night's sleep and continued on our way the next day, thankful for God's provision of a spare transmission a year in advance. 

Some might hear this story and think "What a coincidence." But we know better. 

It was a God thing. And if you don't believe me, I have at least fifty more stories where that came from. 

I'm linking up with Jennifer at Getting Down With Jesus for her blog hop, God-Bumps and God-Incidents.