At risk of sounding morose and depressing, I can’t help myself.
Ever notice how things just always seem to break? It’s painful to maintain anything – the lawn, the house, or a car. Even maintaining your appearance is a losing battle. Outside the roads fill with potholes and weeds grow out of the blacktop. While our world can appear beautiful and pristine, just beneath the polished veneer of anything man-made hides mildew and rot. To take it a step further, death seems evitable, this universe heads towards entropy.
Craig Kidd looks at the melted metal of alloy wheels from his burnt out vehicles after a bushfire swept through his property on February 9, 2009 in Bendigo, Australia.
Ever see a dead animal? Well, the sight of the carcass won’t alarm you so much as the smell will. Left for dead for a few hot summer days, a beast of considerable size will smell exactly like putrid death if you stumble across it. You may even think to yourself, despite what the evil smell tells you otherwise, that at a glance this creature may still be alive. Its skin seems to be moving, pulsating…no, upon closer inspection that’s just thousands of maggots having themselves a ball.
Dealing with a 2001 Volkswagen Jetta that has accumulated over 100,000 miles, this realization is weighing down on me. The asshole car, as I like to call our Jetta, always seems to be getting some sort of mysterious ailment or needing some kind of costly repair. As a note, I would strongly advise anyone ever in the history of car buying to never, ever, under any circumstances buy a Volkswagen. The only good thing about owning a V-dub is that this world is full of Masochists who derive sick pleasure from owning over-engineered foreign cars, so there are many online forums for a distraught Jetta owner to turn to. Just type in “jetta problem” and your search query will generate millions of results – you’re not alone. I’m pretty sure Volkswagen means “the people’s car” because said people will spend the majority of their free time fixing the car.
In the age of mass-produced plastic goodness, “they just don’t make ‘em like they used to”. But, life expectancies today are far greater than they were just one-hundred years earlier. If anything, we’re more desensitized to the crushing blows that death deals.
Driving home from work yesterday, the Jetta started to sputter. The check engine light flickered and then made up its mind to stay on. As for me, rage bubbled over. I wanted to pull over and fight the car, but the absurdity of the notion crept onto my mind. How would I fight a car? Even if I could, the car would probably win. Maybe I could put a brick on the gas pedal and sent the car over a cliff, I thought. Alas, I don’t know of any good Thelma and Louise-type jump-offs around these parts. Finally, I settled on the idea that I’d do my best to hope to participate in some sort of accident, caused by another insured party, that was just severe enough to cripple my asshole car forever but not harm me at all.
Hopefully...maybe.
After stewing about the car for awhile, I realized again how much my negative thoughts consume and dominate me. While the Jetta isn’t the most desirable car, it is a car and it does usually get me from point A to point B (author’s note: most of my car trips consist of going from point A to point B, or from point B back to point A. Sometimes, point C is involved, but that’s another story). In addition, the Jetta was given to us for free! That means we’ve just had to pay for repairs, as costly as they’ve been, and faced no car payments on our second car for over two years! In our current situation, we’d be hard-pressed to come up with another car payment, so reluctantly I admit the Jetta isn’t that bad after all. As I matter of fact, I guess I’m pretty thankful for that car, even if it is an asshole.
Thankfulness is deeper and has more substance than generic positive thinking. For me, it is rooted in the hope that God will change me from an uptight jerk into a relational and emotional being that is capable of loving others.
It is amazing how just a little bit of thankfulness can change the entire out look on a situation, as it did in my case with the Jetta. However, this shouldn’t have been a surprise to me. My tendency to succumb to deep mood swings because of trivial events has been well-documented, yet can be undone in an instant by just a small dosage of gratitude.
As the apostle Paul said, “I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I am…in any and every circumstance I have learned the secret of being filled and going hungry, both of having abundance and suffering need.”
As for me, I think I know the secret, now I just need to start practicing it a little more regularly.
