A brief thought on prayer (and a funny God)

So, for the past week my car has been encased in ice. Well, and about two feet of snow all over, too. Which also extended about four feet left of the driver's side and eight feet in front of it. (I'll let you do the math on the cubic feet of snow I've shoveled off/around it this week.) The point is that for the past week, it has been unmovable, not by abandonment or broken-down-ness, but through an act of God, e.g. the massive snowstorm of a week ago Friday. A couple days ago the Denver Police, however, decided that my car had indeed been abandoned, and left me notice that I had to move it by Sunday at 12:43pm to prove that it wasn't, lest they impound it. Thus my car-getting-out efforts were kicked into even higher gear (though I'd certainly already spent some hours this week working on clearing off the car and shoveling a "driveway" through which to extricate it). By this morning it was snow-free but still entrapped in ice. A friend stopped by after brunch at church this morning with some ice melt and we tried to liberate it again, to no avail. Finally this afternoon another friend and her husband offered to drive over and help push, since it seemed that's all the car needed to get out, now that it'd be shoveled and hacked free of all the apparent ice obstacles.

A few minutes before they arrived, another friend sent me a text message, asking if I'd been able to get my car out yet, and while she was sick, offering to send her fiance over to assist me as well. I replied that between the three of us we could probably get her out, but she could send up some car-getting-unstuck prayers for good measure (I'd been praying a number of those myself already, along with some prayers for peace and patience).

So my friends arrived, and we trudged around the block to my car. There was some pushing, some more hacking and shoveling, some inspecting to see which wheels were turning and which weren't getting a grip and just spinning... not-very-long story even shorter, we got it out.

But what's even more incredible is how many other options we had.

As we walked up, two guys were trying to extricate a car parked a few spaces back, and suggested we could trade pushing services if we couldn't get each car out. A man in a giant green pickup pulled over as he drove through the intersection, and said he had chains to help pull us out (he did end up helping the aforementioned stuck-car-folks out; we'd gotten free by that time). Another man wandered over and was discussing how if he had a long hose, he could run us hot water out of his building. I'm pretty sure one or two other people appeared out of nowhere and offered various sorts of help, too-- it really all was happening at once, so I couldn't really keep track. In none of the hours I'd spent on the car all week had anyone stopped or come over to investigate whether I needed any help.

Yet the minute I asked someone else to pray for the situation too, God sent in the troops from all directions in a ridiculously redundant glut of assistance. 'Cause God is freaking hilarious, and just has a sense of humor like that. :)