On this day, the 22nd of January, 2015, now seven years ago, we spent our first few days traveling through Mexico. It was certainly one of adventure. Looking back, we called it “Missions 101”. If we could navigate through a foreign country by bus and get to our destination, then we could navigate almost anything to come.
It had been a long fourteen hour bus ride to our new international mission assignment as missionary trainees in central Mexico. During our bus trip, we reached a check point. The local authorities started conducting a search of all the luggage that might contain contraband and smuggled goods.
A policeman boarded the bus and asked the passengers. “Who owns a blue suitcase?” My husband and I looked at each other and shrugged. All of our bags were black. About 20 min later, the head honcho boards the bus and was clearly frustrated. He said, “Who owns a blue suitcase with such and such number?” My husband starts looking at our baggage claim ticket for our twenty plus suitcase that miraculously had held all of our personal belongings that we had to our names.
At the bottom of the ticket pile was the baggage claim number that the officer was looking for. My husband gave the ticket to the officer, who then motioned him to disembark the bus. Sitting there with our four children waiting for him to come back, I was getting nervous. I eagerly looked through the curtained window to see if I could tell what was going on. Nothing…for about 20 min we waited along with all the other passengers.
Then, my husband appeared back on the bus. He had a big smile on his face. As he told me the story, the bus began getting back underway. I said eagerly, “What happened?” He laughed and shook his head, “I got off with the officer and he took me to the luggage area, they had removed the largest black bag. I can imagine the whole thing just busted out with how full we packed it. Well, inside the black bag is our blue fire box. They wanted me to open it so they could see what was inside.”
At this point, I am on the edge of my seat. He continued, “Inside the blue box was just our tax papers. When they saw that it contained only papers, they motioned me to re-pack the bag. That is what took so long. I had to stuff everything back in and zip it.” We both chuckled, “All of that fuss for a blue suitcase,” I said. We laughed some more and breathed sighs of relief that we could continue on the trip.
