Stranded City Slickers

Several years ago my best friend Paul and I went deer huntin’ in a part of the state with which we were not familiar. We simply drove deeper into the country until the terrain looked like it had deer in it. Then we turned down a county line road, then a dirt road, then into some farmer’s crop field. We got out and stomped through the woods, guns in hand. The testosterone was so thick you could slice it. I swear, if there were any deer around there they were laughing their white-tails off at us.

Lunch time comes early when you’re deer huntin’, and we headed back to the car. Paul turned on the radio so we could listen to some football and we opened our lunch bags. We ate, and chatted, and snoozed, and listened to the radio until we finally felt obliged to go back out for the afternoon hunt. Not sure how long we had been sitting there with the radio on I advised he start the car to add a little charge to the battery. Guess what happened – or more accurately, what didn’t happen.

We had no clue where we were in relation to a tow truck with jumper cables – didn’t want to go knocking on a door because we really didn’t have permission to be there in the first place. And besides that, there weren’t any doors around to go knock on. This was before the days of cell phones and they didn’t install pay phones out in the woods. We were stranded.

We had guns for food. If we’d had a hatchet or a saw we could have chopped down a few trees and built a cabin and just lived there the rest of our lives. We sure weren’t going anywhere soon. Then we decided to do what people do when they don’t have anywhere else to turn. We prayed and asked for God’s help.

Not even a few minutes had passed after we prayed and a big ole’ pickup truck came rumbling down the road. We flagged them down and asked for help. You’ll think I’m making this up when I tell you that pickup had industrial strength jumper cables wrapped around the front bumper. We obviously weren’t their first stranded city slickers. Hood goes up, engine starts, hood goes down.

Now for the really cool part of the story – as soon as our engine fired up they backed their truck out of the field and drove off in the same direction they came from! Those guys didn’t have any reason for coming down that road…except to help us. And now the clincher - as they drove off we saw it - on the back bumper of this 1 ton flatbed country pickup was a sticker that read Jesus Loves You!

This I know!