Setting out before dawn in Bogotá

Before dawn on Tuesday, August 17, 1976, in our little borrowed room in Bogotá, the alarm clock jarred us into consciousness.

Groggy and shivering from the cold, we pulled on layers of clothes and stuffed barf bags into pockets, remembering Laura Rush’s words from the previous day:

“Don’t forget plastic bags.”

“Plastic bags?”  I had asked.

“Right. Most people get carsick on the drive through the mountains.”

Sigh . . . .

Downstairs in the office, we and the Rushes assembled baggage, seventeen pieces.

A van-like taxicab hummed outside the open office door, its red taillights aglow.

Shivering in the dark, we piled our luggage inside and on top and in every nook and cranny.

We must have resembled Moses and his family when they set out for Egypt, as imagined by Chuck Swindoll, who wrote:

“What a sight that little family must have been as they headed down the desert road . . .  the family’s belongings . . . tied to the donkey’s back. They were leaving a steady job, family, security, and the familiarity of their own surroundings. Midian wasn’t much, but it had been their home for forty years. And now they were on their way. . . .” (Great Days with the Great Lives)

In Chapter 5 of Please, God, Don’t Make Me Go, I wrote:

Soon hints of daylight peeked through a haze. Bogotá’s streets already bustled with cars, pedestrians, donkey carts, and buses belching noxious fumes. 

Our taxi driver zigged and zagged around snarled traffic. We clung to door handles and bumped against each other. 

The driver brought us to a halt on a block lined with one-story buildings, soot-covered, grim. Decaying fruit and vegetables littered street and sidewalk, along with shreds of yellowed newspapers, bloody spittle, cigarette butts, and more. I forced my eyes to focus instead on our cabby, who darted through a filthy door. 

A pack of men spied us. They wore woolen garments, torn and frayed. Hair tangled, matted. Teeth missing. Faces and hands smudged with the gray that clung to doors and walls and air. 

One of them sauntered toward our taxi, stooped, and peered at us, his nose nearly touching the window. He snarled what was, I guessed, an obscenity, tottered sideways, turned, and shuffled away. 

The driver returned, a receipt in hand—a permit to transport us, Laura said—and we set off again, our eyes and throats stinging from exhaust. (from Chapter 5, Please, God, Don’t Make Me Go)

Be sure to come back next week—I’ll tell you about our wild and crazy journey! I’m so glad no one had yet told us horror stories about the journey we faced. If they had, I’d have been terrified to set out through the Andes in that taxi. In my case, ignorance was bliss.

Chuck Swindoll asks all of us:

Have you stepped out in faith like [Moses did] recently?

Have you made a move, followed the nudging of God,

into realms you wouldn’t have even dreamed of five years ago?

He will honor your faith as you trust Him in that kind of walk.

Those who remain in the false security of Midian

never get to experience what Moses experienced

on that winding highway to Egypt—

the sense of moving in the strong current

of God’s will and plan.

Press on!

(Chuck Swindoll, Great Days with the Great Lives)