On our way back to Germany we experienced God’s care for us in the “baggage miracle.”
About a week before we went back to Germany we have been at Columbia airport to get an infant ticket for Amy. Normally this is no problem and it costs about 10% of an adult ticket. We paid $415 and so we expected not much complication and a cheap $40 ticket. The representative at the counter, however, could not find the price for our tickets in the system although he searched for 2 hours. He really tried hard but there was no way because we had a special ticket offer. After 2 hours he said the only way is that he takes the actual ticket price, which was $3500, and that changed Amy’s ticket to around $390. So I decided to go home and try to find another cheaper way. Amy was also with us and she was running around and climbing on everything. Just in the moment the representative told us there is no other option except the expensive price Amy fell down the baggage scale. She had a deep cut at her forehead and blooded. Joe just handed his credit card to the representative telling him to give us the expensive ticket and we went to the ER to get Amy’s head fixed. After that we were angry he whole week because of the expensive ticket.
The coming week we were packing and realized that we really had a lot of stuff and that we need to have several additional bags, which will be quite expensive. So we planned to have an additional check in bag per person for $100 and a lot of books in the carry-on which made our carry-on bags close to 40lb/20kg each. Additionally we also asked a friend to take a second bag for us to Germany in January.
At Saturday we did an online check in and when we tried to add the additional baggage we realized that we had not 1 but 4 free pieces of baggage per person. We wondered if our cheap ticket was a wrong fare and that we really might be in trouble (only military tickets usually have four free pieces). I tried to call the airline but there was no way to come through. So we decided to trust God that he will care for us and that the ticket will be alright. On Sunday morning Joe brought our bags to the airport and everything seemed to be alright. They checked in the bags without questions about our ticket. The only problem was Amy’s bag. We had decided to check in the guitar for Amy’s 20lb/10kg infant allowance. The representative was not pleased by a baby bag in form of a guitar. They recommended taking the guitar as carry on and checking in one of our carry-on bags. Well, that was a problem, because our carry on was not exactly 20lb… Finally they searched their computer and realized wondering that we have four free bags and recommended that we should just check in the guitar as regular baggage and that we could also check in our heavy carry-on bags. We asked why we have so much free baggage and they explained that our infant ticket was nearly the price of the adult ticket and that this might have given us the free baggage. So finally we checked in 10 items for free (8 suitcases, a car seat and a stroller) which normally would cost $1400 baggage fee. God used the expensive infant ticket to care for us but Amy had to fall down to force Joe to buy the ticket and not to try to care for himself. So often we do not realize how God provides for us and we are even angry with him because we do not see the big picture. God is in control and he cares!