You're Never Done - Nor Is God

As you read a few posts below, I've had a nagging problem with my car. After weeks of checking vacuum lines, spraying choke/carb cleaner around to check for leaks, and nearly running the batteries down on my multimeter testing wiring and equipment, I was ready to give up and go to a mechanic. I gave it one more shot, and finally tracked down my hesitation problem - a loose pulse sensor connection. Easy fix. After 16 months, my 17-year old car was restored! Finished! Done!!

So I left for Kansas yesterday to help bury my last great aunt, and drove the Bimmer. It ran like a charm. I listened to great music. When I got west of Van Buren, Missouri, into the Ozarks, I was driving it like the sports car it was meant to be; hugging corners, feeling the speed and thrill of doing so - as well as making great time. I didn't set any land speed records, nor drove recklessly. I was just able to do a little more with a car that was built to do so.

When I got to my destination yesterday evening of Pittsburg, KS, I picked an aunt up at the motel we're staying at and went to the home of my great aunt's only living child (in downtown Curranville - dare you to find THAT on a map!). She and her husband, Phyllis and Eddie, have always been very gracious people and got the gift of hospitality that my great aunt was so well known for very honestly.

When I was a kid, I always thought Eddie was one cool dude; he was a star football player in high school, he worked on cars, and restored a classic car for each of his children and gave them to them as a gift - a super guy. So it was with a little bit of irony that after he went outside to help a neighbor get her car turned around in the yard, he came back inside and said, "Sky... I just backed into your car."

Uh oh.


I went outside with him, got a flashlight, and surveyed the damage. It wasn't really that bad; the SUV was much higher than my car, and the receiving hitch had struck my car mid-grill and wrinkled the hood a bit. With a little wire, I put the grill back together. It'll get me home. But crap... I just finished fixing this car up. What rotten luck! I thought I was finished and done!!

Of course, Eddie was sick - in fact, I think he was a lot sicker than me about it - being a guy who's been fixing cars a lot longer than me. But as I told him, heck, any of us could have done it, and it didn't help that my black car blended perfectly with the pitch black of the Kansas prairie. All in all, it's not bad, and could have been a heck of a lot worse. Material things can always be fixed. But it dawned on me on the way back to the motel... I'm not finished with my car after all.

The good news is, God isn't done or finished with us yet, either. We are all in various states of imperfection, and we all succumb to various sins from time to time. I am glad God doesn't give up on us, nor thinks that He's ever "done" with us.

The prophet Jeremiah said that the word of God came to him, saying: "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart."

God knows us very, very well. And even when we think we're finished and done, God is not yet finished. And when we fall or crash - God picks us up again, heals us, and indeed, fixes us.

Thanks be to God.

Pax,
Sky+