For Wilshire Baptist Church
On the way to our house for Thanksgiving dinner, my mother’s aging Chevy Equinox SUV suddenly stalled and she had to coast across a lane of traffic and into an apartment parking lot. She called me on her cell phone, frightened and frazzled, and I rushed to the rescue, but within about an hour her vehicle was towed to a service garage and we were at our house enjoying the feast including the food she prepared. It couldn’t have worked out any better than that, but as is often the case, it was just the beginning of another major change in her life.
As it turned out, the SUV needed a new transmission, which for a 13-year-old Chevy actually means a rebuilt transmission. They just aren’t rolling new 2011s off the assembly line anymore. We’d been wanting her to get some fresh, more dependable wheels, so the Thanksgiving breakdown presented a golden opportunity to do exactly that. My only dread was the extensive shopping expedition that lay ahead.
But that didn’t happen because Mom had just two main requirements for a new ride. She wanted a level entry and exit onto the driver’s seat; she didn’t want to have to climb in or crawl out. And, she wanted it to be red. That was a sentimental memorial to my father, whose last car was a bright red Chevy Cruze that made a statement on the road and could be easily found in a parking lot, including at church. The dealership where we towed the old SUV had a new one meeting both those needs, and the transaction including the trade-in went quickly without the usual hours of dickering and drama.
The interesting thing we learned when they diagnosed the old SUV was the transmission wouldn’t shift into drive, but it still would shift into reverse. It couldn’t be driven forward, but it could be driven backwards all over town if one wanted to travel that way.
You know by now I’m always looking for life lessons in situations like this, and here it is: It seems like a lot of times when we get stuck, we’re satisfied to go backwards toward what we’ve already dealt with and survived, regardless of how awkward it is. Or, we’re comfortable sitting safely in park with what’s familiar. But it takes some courage and trust in yourself and God to go forward with something new, whether it’s living alone for the first time in your life or buying a new car.
Mom replaced her old Equinox with a new Equinox, but it’s the same in name only. The engineering and technologies between the old and new couldn’t be more different. The new one has bells and whistles we’ve never seen before — features that seemed science-fiction a decade ago — so I’m not much help getting her up to speed. The best I can do is tell her what I would do myself: focus on the main things needed to get around safely. She can learn about some of the other features later, and then maybe she can teach them to me.