Bragging Rights | Previous Challenge Entry

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TITLE: Bragging Rights | Previous Challenge Entry
By Vicki Thomas
04/27/17
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Bragging rights. I earned them. I never wanted them, but they are mine nonetheless. I would gladly give them up, if someone would just come along and top what I managed to accomplish that dark November night. But I pray no one does…

The Christian concert had been very uplifting for me. I had needed it. I may have selfishly agreed to take my twelve passenger van, full of Native teen girls from our reservation, so that I could enjoy the concert for myself. To live on the mission field can be extremely draining, and I anticipated this to be an opportunity to give – but also to receive for a change as well. It had worked. The hour drive back home had been filled with girls giggling, singing, and sharing the pictures they had taken of themselves with the artists. It had definitely been worth it.

As midnight approached, we drove through town, dropping off each girl. The remaining girls shuffled around to move toward the front of the van and fill in the first seat.

“You guys need to make sure you are buckled back up,” I instructed my own two girls, and the last Native girl left in the van. She lived out on the outskirts of town and it was going to be a few more miles. Jessica, another young missionary who lived and worked with us on the reservation, sat in the passenger’s seat. We chatted, anxious for our long evening to come to an end. Little did we know, the end was near…

Jessica screamed. I blinked, unable to process how to respond to the large animal, standing broadside in the road, so I just hit it full force – at 55 miles per hour – and it magically disappeared. In that blink of an eye, so many things happened, that I’m still not sure how we managed to fit them all in. Airbags exploded, filling the darkness with gray dust. Shoes flew past me and hit the dashboard. The van came to a screeching halt in the middle of the road, seemingly of its own volition. Girls were crying. I could hear Jessica coughing from the dust, but I couldn’t see anyone. The horn had engaged, filling our frightening experience with so much noise, that it caused me to feel panicked and desperate to get away from it. Thank God we could - we were all somehow unharmed.

I groped for my purse to find my phone to call for help. Priority was to get the girls out. Jessica’s door was crushed shut. She made her way to the sliding side door near the girls, shoved it open – and then quickly shut it.

“We can’t get out this way!” she shouted through the smoke and darkness, over the blaring horn.

…What Jessica saw, that I didn’t know at the time, was that the blind horse we had hit was wedged underneath the van - and exiting through the side door would have required us to climb out over his head…

So, with some force, I managed to get the driver’s door open and we all crawled out into the cold, dark night. We gathered the shaken girls onto the grass on the shoulder of the road, and moved far enough away from the noise of the horn for me to gather my scattered thoughts as well. Onlookers and policemen had already begun to stop and ponder the spectacle we had created, when suddenly, without warning, flames began to shoot up from inside the van. We watched, helplessly, as the van – and the horse – quickly became consumed in fire…and then violently exploded. No one would soon forget our mission work here. We had left our mark. And I, inadvertently, earned some bragging rights…

…Because I happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Just a few years prior, our family had been in the right place at the right time. It was how we ended up on that mission field in the first place. Our lives had been traveling along at 55 miles per hour in the direction of the American dream – and then we ran into Christ, and everything exploded. Praise God. We sold our possessions, packed up our six children, and headed to the mission field – and I can’t boast about that any more than I can boast about blowing up my van…but “Therefore, as it is written: Let him who boasts boast in the LORD.” (I Cor. 1:31 NIV)

Non-fiction

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