Needle in a Snow Drift

This story actually took place back in January of this year. However, it is one of several "inspirations" for me starting this blog. I think it is such a great story that I had to share with with you even if it may be "old news".

Back in January (as I already mentioned), the family all prepared for a trip to the city to purchase much needed warm weather clothes for our growing children.  We had quite a list of necessary items to find and that meant we had quite a few stops on our itinerary for the day. Now, driving in Russia is never boring and even at times can be exhausting as you are constantly looking out for the other person. Add strong winds, blowing snow, high humidity, black ice, and well below freezing temperatures to these already tense conditions and driving here becomes quite an adventure. A good example of the road conditions is pictured below. This is the first main highway as you are driving out of our village in Elita.

On this particular day of our planned shopping trip as we reached the halfway point to the city, we had a vehicle behind us that just wasn't patient enough to wait for us to pass a slow-moving truck.  As we tried to get out of the way of the hurried driver and then back into the passing lane we hit some ice and took a little slide right into a snowbank. We immediately thanked the Lord for His protection as our truck could have easily kept sliding into oncoming traffic. Instead we did a "nice" smooth spin and hit the snowbank on our side of the road facing the opposite direction. Our truck suffered no damage at all. After trying to a bit to get us out of the pit we were stuck in from the snow plows throwing a thick layer of snow along the edges of the road, a nice man stopped to help us. He pulled us out using our tow rope and we were back on the road to continue our drive to the city. Although our nerves were a bit rattled, we had a great day checking off items on our list and rejoicing in the fact that we made it home safe and sound.

The next day, David headed out to buy coal to heat our house. Along the way, an officer stopped him and asked him where the front license plate for our car was. To David's surprise, it was missing! He immediately called me and told me of how the officer let him know that we were missing the front tags on our car and we both thought...we were all over the place yesterday! Where could we have lost it? We had no idea when we lost it but we both were wondering if our little incident could have knocked it loose. Later that day, David and I went to a grocery store not too far from the spot where we went off the road earlier. We brought along a snow shovel hoping that we might be able to find our lost treasure. In Russia it is a very long process to get new tags in the first place or replace them if you lose them. No one wants to have to go through the process unless they absolutely have to! Therefore it is not an unusual thing to see lost tags on display in gas station windows or even men using sticks or their bare hands to "fish" through flooded streets where they just lost their license plates. 

As we tried to guess at the exact place where we went off the road, we quickly realized how many other people had the same experience. There were at least five or six areas similar to ours. Then I remembered that near our car, as we just turned our car around, I had seen a plastic bottle lying in the snow. The night of our incident the winds had been very strong and we feared that the snow drifts would have covered the bottle and our tracks making it almost impossible to find a lost, white license plate. Finally, after checking several spots along the road, we found our plastic bottle and recognized our tracks! As I sat in the truck praying, David began digging in a few spots also praying that we would find our tags. As he was almost ready to give up and figured we had lost it further down the road, he hit something metal with the shovel. It was our license plate! We couldn't believe we had actually been able to find it in such deep snow and were so excited about this answer to prayer!