a revolutionary gift

This whole story is a wonder to me.  It's a dozen miracles all lined up and linked together.  

Pure, lavish, wonderful gift.

Nearly three years ago when we started dreaming of maybe one day owning a car in China, I thought it would simply make our lives a thousand times easier.  I'm seeing now that it's also streamlining our time and our energy and equipping us to be able to serve in more places, more people, all for the King.  And of course we are personally so helped and blessed by it too.  

We just couldn't be more grateful to the Lord and to his people.  

As soon as we knew we were finally, fully able to buy a used car for our family, we searched online for the model that our friends had already researched for us.  Handy, having a smart friend with one more kid than we do, who did all the research for the best quality, cheapest, safest minivan available.  But when we pulled up the long list of used models available in our humongous city.... well, it wasn't long.  For several days there was just this one car...

And we weren't sure it would be the best one for us... honestly, it wasn't our favorite color.  Silly, huh?  But Matt went to look at it and came home with the report:  it only had 4,000 miles but it had been driven hard, was scuffed up inside and out and it's been smoked in.... but how deep can smoke sink in just 4,000 miles?

Well, it's ours now, all by the grace of God, and it has scrubbed clean and it's been a fun family project to tackle together and air it out and sing loud in it for good measure too.  It's a stick shift (that on top of really getting chinese traffic norms has been a hurdle for me.  Matt's leading the way fearlessly, wonderfully.)   Our friends who first researched this model told me that they call it a "microvan" to more accurately communicate the size and strength....  And this is our car.  We're enjoying this gift so much!   What a GIFT!  Crazy how much a burden it lifts to simply be able to get to friends homes and to the grocery store !!! without sweating over how we'd go or get things home.  And we'll be looking for opporutnities to volunteer at an orphanage and will hopefully get out to some parks and mountains soon too.....  What a thrill to have this all possible for us now!   

 The Father provided a great car at a great price for us... we came out just a hair under budget!  When Matt showed our van to a local friend, he was very surprised to see how nice it was. Our buddy knew how much we paid for it and he expected that we'd gotten less of a good car.  I like that.  That's our kind of car :) ... and oh, have I said this yet?  We couldn't be more glad or grateful!

Thanks for your joy with us for a silly, huge, wonderful gift like this...   

And we are wide open to take your suggestions for names for our little van.  It's got to be a good one.  What do you think?