MOULTRIE — When Saul of Tarsus was traveling to Damascus, God got his attention by striking him blind with a lightning bolt. When God wanted Sonny Bridges’ attention, he was a shade less dramatic, but it got the job done.

July 1994. Bridges left Moultrie July 4 to visit a friend at Emory Hospital in Atlanta. The voice on the radio was talking about flooding in western Georgia, but Bridges didn’t have to turn on his windshield wipers the whole trip up there. He stayed two days in Atlanta and never even had to cover his head to avoid raindrops.

On July 6 he started home. The radio man said South Georgia was inaccessible: “You can’t get there from here.”

Bridges didn’t believe it. Retired from the Department of Education as a consultant who designed bus routes, Bridges knew all the highways and all the backroads in 33 South Georgia school systems. When he encountered state troopers blocking I-75 in Macon, he simply turned off and took Pio Nono Avenue.

Until he encountered a creek where the road used to be.

No problem, he said. He turned around and tried another route. And found Department of Transportation barricades.

Again and again he tried different routes to get home, only to meet up with closed roads and overflowing waterways. He even tried to make it to Savannah so as to come down the coast.

Finally, he pulled to the side of the road.

“God called me right there to work for him,” Bridges recalled during an interview this week.

“I was too proud,” he said. “I ran my own life, but God humbled me: ‘Son, you can’t get home.’”

Bridges said he agreed to do whatever God wanted him to do. He got back on the road, and eventually came to a federal highway heading south. It took him a ways toward home, but then Bridges thought of a short cut. He turned off, met with another closed road, turned around and got back on the highway.

When he got home, Bridges told his wife, Ruth, what he’d experienced and what he’d decided.

“She said, ‘I’ll follow you anywhere God leads you, but I won’t go to Bangladesh.’”

The Bridges became involved in missions work, and their first assignment was not Bangladesh … but it was bad enough. Nicaragua, the largest country in Central America, is the second poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere (after Haiti). Sonny Bridges remembered three Spanish phrases from classes 40 years before; Ruth Bridges didn’t speak the language at all.

“We went,” Sonny Bridges said, “[and] fell in love with mission work.”