No, no, no! Don’t look down!

Drives through the Andes were the stuff of legends—not myths, not made-up tales, but the histories of dozens of families. (If you missed last week’s post, click on Of Andean hairpin turns: I tried to stifle my hysteria.)

Today you could sit down with anyone who spent time in Lomalinda and he’d tell you hair-raising accounts of journeying through the Andes—stories about upchucking, long delays due to mudslides, other delays at police checkpoints, and reports of filthy bathrooms along the way.

But especially you’d hear stories about the dangers of the trip. You’d hear about urgent prayers for safety.

Linda Wheeler Hollingsworth recently told me of bus trips she and her family took several times through the Andes from Pasto to Puerto Asis while, for many years, her parents served as linguists and Bible translators among Colombia’s Siona people.

Linda writes,

“The bus was usually packed with standing room only, shared with all manner of livestock and people .  . .  and to top it off, loud Colombian music with the occasional translated Cindy Lauper or Stevie Wonder thrown in. My favorite was ‘Solo Llamé a Decir te Quiero.’ [Note from LT: If I remember my Spanish correctly, I think that’s I Just Want to Say I Love You.]

“We could look out the window and see down the mountain in a fog-covered abyss. One of the dual back tires would often hang over the edge. The driver drove pretty fast. . . .”

Read that paragraph again. Imagine sitting beside Linda on that bus.

At that point in the recent conversation with Linda, her older brother, Jim Wheeler, spoke up. “That was the craziest bus ride I remember! I think we did it three or four times.

“The really wild rides were in the old chiva buses. The driver would stop at El Mirador where we had to wait on the one-way traffic to make it up the cliff/mountain. . . .

“I remember walking with [brother] Franky over to the edge of the lookout. We couldn’t see the bottom because there were too many clouds in the way, but we could look off and see the broccoli-like jungle thousands of feet in the distance.”

After waiting for the one-way oncoming traffic to finish, “the driver’s assistant would call everyone into the bus. The driver would light a candle at the nearby shrine, jump into the driver’s seat, cross himself, and then gun the engine for the wild ride down.

“We could see the wheels hanging off the edge. . . .

“What really freaked me out was looking up as we went down the switchback road and seeing saplings sticking out of the mountain on the underside of the road above us. Then I realized that [moments earlier] we had been riding on that same stretch of road in a six-ton bus!

“We could see crosses all along the way where travelers must have fallen.

“One time I was sitting toward the front of the bus. The driver’s assistant looked at me, pointed to his eyes, pointed down the side of the mountain, then shook his finger, ‘No, no, no!’ Better not look down on that trip!

“Often the assistant had to get out and guide the driver around a hairpin turn. That’s when the wheels would really hang over the edge!

“We were always very glad to get to the bottom!”

I guess so, Jim! I guess so! Thanks for sharing your stories with us, Linda and Jim.

These accounts make me tremble. 

How about you?

Can you imagine being a parent in such a locale 

and pushing hard to carry out work God had led you to do?

While contemplating that, I remind myself that God’s ways are not always our ways. “‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways,’ declares the Lord. ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts’” (Isaiah 55:8-9 NIV).

His ways are higher than ours—that is, He doesn’t look at life in the same way we do.

When His ways crash against our ways, we need to do a “doggie head tilt.” (Mike Metzger: “If your head never tilts, your mind never changes.”) When God asks us to do something that seems crazy, we need to look at life from a different angle—from His angle, not ours.

Jesus warned those who wanted to follow him, saying “Count the cost before you set out” (Luke 14:28).

“Large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and he turned and said to them, ‘If anyone comes to me but loves his father, mother, wife, children, brothers or sisters—or even life—more than me, he cannot be my follower. Whoever is not willing to carry his cross and follow me cannot be my follower. If you want to build a tower, you first sit down and decide how much it will cost, to see if you have enough money to finish the job. If you don’t, you might lay the foundation, but you would not be able to finish. Then all who would see it would make fun of you, saying, ‘This person began to build but was not able to finish’” (Luke 14:25-30, NCV).

Those who decided to work in Colombia had taken those verses and Proverbs 20:25 seriously: “Don’t trap yourself by making a rash promise to God and only later counting the cost.”

I believe each family that relocated to Colombia to serve God, like Linda and Jim’s parents did, counted the cost ahead of time. One of those costs was harrowing trips through the Andes, and while over the years some Lomalindians did suffer injuries, some of them serious, I’m not aware of any deaths.

In the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, our colleagues experienced much worse dangers than Andean roads, especially at the hands of Marxist guerrillas.

But they kept working there even when it was dangerous, even when it didn’t make sense.

At such times, Oswald Chambers’ perspective helps us make that necessary doggie head tilt: “Faith is deliberate confidence in the character of God whose ways you might not understand at the time.”

What courage my colleagues chose!

What faith they demonstrated!

And what a privilege God gave me 

to work alongside them and learn from them.