Update on the Car Situation

First of all, thank you for your prayers and encouraging words. They helped us a lot. Things have gotten a whole lot better. As I said in the last post, God works all things together for our good. This was a bad situation and had the potential of getting even worse.

Chris told us that if the other party wanted to "get nasty" about things, they could take the route of suing me or having me put in jail because I was illegally driving (without knowing of course). BUT, GOD! Psalm 27:1-2 says, "The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? the LORD is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? When evil people come to devour me, when my enemies and foes attack me, they will stumble and fall."

I could keep going with that verse. It is so powerful. We saw the hand of God move powerfully this week. No lawsuits ensued; no charges were pressed. Chris and I went to the police station on Thursday during the day and signed off on papers. One paper was just saying I agreed to pay for the other guy's car. The other paper was about the medical bills of the teenager that was driving. Nothing on the paper said that I would pay for any future bills, like he had previously requested. The boy's father was also there to sign everything and the police signed and stamped all the paperwork. So, that is finished. They can't come back with anything against me now. After the other party had signed the paperwork, he left. The police officer marvelled at how easily everything was resolved. He asked Chris and the other guy from school that came with us how they pulled that off. He said usually these situations do not end well and a lot of fighting takes place. (I think about how it should have especially been so because I am a foreigner, and sadly, they probably just see $$ signs, even thought I don't have$$). That is a testimony right there. Everything was solved fairly quickly and much easier and more peaceful than anyone had expected.

God is good.

Since the insurance has no effect--except that it will cover the boy's medical bills for the next 3 weeks-- the school offered to pay for 50% of the repair bills.

The cost to fix our car was 462,200 Won. I still don't understand the need for repair, but ultimately it is the school's car and it is their choice. This car has hundreds of thousands of miles on it, it's really old, there's mold growing on the inside of the car, there are dents and scratches all over the outside. There are major mechanical problems with the car. But, it still needs to be fixed. The other day, I opened the door to find this:


A huge puddle! Our car has a major leaking problem amongst other things! This must be why mold is flourishing inside of the car. If it was my car, I wouldn't be fixing it. I'm just sayin!

The estimate on the other car is 1.4 million Won, but somebody at the school knows somebody who knows the owner of the repair shop so they're gonna try to lower the bill a little. We'll be paying half of whatever the final amount is.

We've struggled with the fairness of everything. Ultimately, I did get in the accident. The school should be responsible for paying for some. We were talking about asking them to refund all of our insurance money that we paid over the last 9 or so months (close to 500,000 Won), in addition to paying 50%. But really, with the type of insurance the school probably had, the 50% we're paying is probably close enough to what we would have paid with insurance.

So even if we don't get the insurance money refunded, we are still grateful. This all could have been a whole lot worse.

Like my childhood pastor (who happened to lose one of his sons to Leukemia at 23 years old) used to always say, "God is good all the time; and all the time, God is good."