The Blue Van & The Manly Men

Hollywood lives!  Thanks to Lauren Carr Cacciatore for sending me a picture of John Willis and his muppet Hollywood (with sunglasses) to share with my readers.  Lauren is a regular reader and was recently married.  You will be reading about her in the days to come.  She is still an angel!!!

I have mentioned before that while on our Mountain Top trip in 1994 that we had two church vans; a nice white one, which Jill Painter drove, and a blue one, which I drove.  The blue van had issues.  The radio didn't work.  The cruise control didn't work.  The air conditioning was suspect, seeming only to work when it was not hot outside.  The speedometer was questionable.  And, most importantly for purposes of this story, the gas gauge was not accurate.

We had left Mountain Top for the last time (and I do mean last; there was NO WAY I was ever going back again!) and were driving through the hills of Tennessee when suddenly the blue van came to an abrupt halt.  I know very little about cars and engines and such, but even I was smart enough to figure out pretty quickly that we were out of gas.  The gauge didn't say so, but we were.  Oops.  I had overestimated how far we could make it before having to refuel, and now we were stuck in the middle of the middle of nowhere.  Jill drove ahead (left us, in other words) and found the nearest gas station a few miles down the road.  After you hear what we did next, you may ask the question, "Why didn't you just send Jill to buy a gas can and bring back some gas?"  I have no response to that.  It would have made perfect sense.  But it was not what we did.  Instead, the manly men of our group-  Matt Schmidt, Todd Willis, Brian Watson, Matt Wheeler, Brad Watson, Ben Thacker, Hamp Sessions, Scott Burlison and myself-  pushed that van for about 2 miles in the hot June sun.  I give all the guys credit, because to tell the truth I don't remember who all actually pushed.  But push we did, and we eventually arrived at the gas station.  We had conquered the road and were feeling very macho...

We were bonding over our manly feat of strength when it came time to continue.  We were also incredibly sweaty and smelly, and preparing to continue our journey in a van without a decent AC system.  So the guys decided to "air out."  All of the windows were opened.  The girls were are securely placed in the white van with Jill.  Most of the guys then removed their shirts and their pants and rode for the next couple of ours in only their boxers.  It was a unifying display of manly pride that once again served as one of those unplanned events that pull a group together.  Only those of us who were not wearing boxers did not participate as I recall.  Thank God we had the good sense to excuse ourselves from the adventure!  Between the boxer brigade and them making fun of me for running out of gas in the first place, the trip was very upbeat and joyful as we headed for our stop in Atlanta.  And Dr. Jill and I were even now- a speeding ticket for her, running out of gas for me!

This merry band of travellers was becoming quite the youth group family.  And we still had a couple of adventures to go...

Because of Jesus,