Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

Let the wicked fall into their own nets, while I pass by in safety.

• Psalm 141:10

Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High
    will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.
I will say of the Lord, “He is my refuge and my fortress,
    my God, in whom I trust.”
Surely he will save you
    from the fowler’s snare
    and from the deadly pestilence.
He will cover you with his feathers,
    and under his wings you will find refuge;
    his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart.

• Psalm 91:1-4

Do not put the Lord your God to the test as you did at Massah.

• Deuteronomy 6:16

It is now between Christmas and New Years.  In the northern states of the USA, weather is unpredictable all winter, but for the days between Christmas and New Years, I did business travel two times and both times I was in a motor vehicle on Ohio interstates.

On one occasion, I had taught a class in Kentucky for the first two days of that week, Monday and Tuesday, no snow at all.  Wednesday was New Year’s Eve.  I decided to have my wife check out of the hotel after I left for work that Tuesday.  With any luck, we might make it home that night near midnight.  I was driving the truck hauling our demonstration equipment.  I packed everything as fast as I could and we started the drive from western Kentucky, north into Indiana, then east to Louisville, KY, and then northeast to Cincinnati, OH.

It had been cold that day, but as we approached Cincinnati, there was snow blowing across the road.  Nothing had stuck, but my wife suggested we pull in for the night.  We stopped north of Cincinnati, only four and a half hours from home, but she said we might hit patches of ice.

We got a room with two twin beds and we each picked one.  She went for the one closest to the bathroom.  I picked the one closest to the heating unit.

At 2:00am, I woke up and went to the bathroom.  When I walked back into the bedroom, my wife had the reading light on, and she was reading a book.  She asked, “If you think you had enough sleep, let’s go home now.  The weather report says that the interstates are getting slippery, and you are driving a truck.”

We were on the road by 3:00am.  The drive from our hotel to Columbus, OH should take an hour and a half.  Four hours later, since the left lane was not plowed, snow depth about two feet, and the big trucks were going slow.  How do you write slow in slow motion?  I mean slow!

We stopped south of Columbus and went to a 24-hour breakfast place.  We left the restaurant before the sun came up.  Halfway between Columbus and home, we ran out of windshield washer fluid.  We had been eating salt spray from the trucks the entire way.  We stopped to top off with gas, clean the windshield, and buy an extra bottle of fluid.  We pulled into the office parking lot at 1:00pm, taking over twice the time to drive those highways.  The parking lot was empty, an unofficial surprise half-day off.  My wife would not be able to help me unload, and I did not have the security code, something that got fixed right after New Year’s Weekend.  When I called the number, one guy in my group answered.  He said that he knew I needed help, and he did not want me to feel deserted.  It’s sad, he sacrificed a couple of hours of his time, and he was the one laid off that next year.

That was one year, the next trip was not even my job.  I was the training manager, and it was a training job, but another engineer had all the project management duties.  I rode shotgun just to answer any questions of a technical nature or about how the demonstrations would go.

We arrived at Zanesville, OH, along the same interstate route, but our final destination was further west than where my wife and I had stayed on the other trip, still just north of Cincinnati, but on a different interstate.

My friend was driving a rear-wheel drive two-door car, maybe fifteen years old.  It started snowing while we ate lunch.  We got back on the road and only drove twenty miles.  We were parked on the interstate.  We later learned that on seemingly no ice at all, five trucks had jackknifed, and the highway was impassable.  They redirected us to a side road through the town of Gratiot, OH.  Every time I drive past that intersection, I get chills.  Hours later, in Gratiot, we saw a highway patrol driving the opposite direction.  My friend got out and waved the trooper down.  The trooper was female.  The breaks locked and she was still sliding.  She calmly rolled down the window and yelled, “I will be back to you as soon as I can stop this thing.”  She only had about another hundred yards (meters – with this estimate does it matter?) to walk or slip and slide, back to us.  She told us that we were again stopped because a tractor trailer had jackknifed, blocking the detour.  My friend told her where we were going and she said we could take this farm road down to US highway 22 and then get back on the interstate near Washington Courthouse, OH.  We followed her directions, and I started quickly trying to find the road on the map (before GPS).  We got two miles down and yet another truck had jackknifed, and that detour was now blocked.  We decided to go home, but as we got back to Zanesville, he said, “One more try!”  We went through Zanesville and linked up with highway 22 and followed the trooper’s directions the rest of the way.  My friend slipped and slid on the road, but we made it.

When we arrived at our meeting the next morning, with only 3-4 hours of sleep, they told us that if we had cancelled, they would not have believed our excuse.  They had only had a dusting of snow over that past 24 hours.  Our meeting was over by lunch, and we made it home with no problems.  We saw the deep ruts where the trucks had wrecked, but they had all been rescued by the time we were heading home.

Deuteronomy 6:16 says “Do not put the Lord your God to the test as you did at Massah.”  I think driving through Ohio during that week is considered testing God.  But in trusting God, we made it each time.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.