Chaotic Grace

So every one says that in the Latin culture things move slow, and normally they do… But another thing is that everything is done at the last minute. Yesterday our 90 day tourist visas expired and today our temporary permission to drive the truck and trailer expired, we thought we had until tomorrow. Wow that means we have already been here for three months and how blessed have we been! So we have been trying to get these things worked out before now. All last week the offices were closed for Semana Santa, “Holy Week.” So this made us a little stressed… ok very stressed. So this morning (April 13) I (Tristan) finished repairing the trailer and Beth packed the bags for a possible emergency trip to El Salvador. So we got to the lawyers office at 1pm, we didn’t realize we had the wrong dates until 10am this morning. This was the beginning of our trek of waiting and rushing… without balance. First we try to extend the vehicle visas. So we get to the office and we need copies… an hour later we have copies. Great we get in the office, we had help! Then we are told that they need to keep my passport to finish the extension, they need it for 3-4 days. Now remember our personal visas are expired too. So we call the lawyer and he says that they don’t need to keep my passport for the personal visa. In the car and off to the immigration office we went. We go there and sat, waited, and stressed. Finally they got to us and as soon as I finished my part, me and our helper took off and left Beth to finish hers. So we now had 20 minutes to get back to finish the vehicle extension. This building is all the way across town, and its 4:40, so I prayed and hit the road. Now if we don’t get there by 5:00 there will be a fine of almost $500 and they probably won’t grant the extension. AAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!! Now remember we brought the trailer so we could leave to El Salvador if we needed to. So all this is with a 20+ foot trailer tailgating me the whole way. Well we were blessed and made it to the office with 5min to spare, we dropped off my passport and then returned to pick up Beth. All in all it was a great day and we got it all done in 4 hours… that is a miracle, God provided for our needs. He continues to be faithful and we praise him for that!!

Love You ALL