another lesson from my car

My flight got in at 12:05am last night. Maybe you have taken such a flight at some point in your travels. I had been on a plane since 6:35pm that evening with a layover in Charlotte. I was tired because it was past my bedtime and I was tired from traveling.

I get to my car which was parked in a garage for the last 4 days. I could tell that my car missed me and was waiting for me to tell her all about my visit with my girlfriend in Houston. Or so I thought. I put my key in the driverside door and turn it twice. In my little vehicle, if you turn it once it opens your door but if you turn it twice it opens all of them. But not this time.

Immediately my heart sank. For the double key turn to work, there has to be at least a little power left in the battery. I knew this wasn't good. I hopped in really quickly and turned the ignition. Nothing. Not a crank. Not a rattle. Not even a little beep. Completely dead.

I have had problems with my starter before and at least then you get some sort of sickly response from the car. But with a dead battery, I got cold silence. So the next humorous half-hour included my first idea, to push the car down an incline and try to pop the clutch, and then my second idea, to call for a jump by the parking patrol with the emergency garage phone.

My car seems to be teaching me lessons these days. I guess God uses the ordinary, the mundane to speak to us sometimes. It was so odd to get such a dead reaction from my car. Even a simple thing like trying to open my car doors was met only with silence. My car was dead. Not dead like "take it to the scrap yard" dead. Just dead to the point of uselessness.

Isn't this how we are? Our battery runs down or runs out completely. We die. For those who follow Christ, its not so much that we need a new battery. We got one of those a while back. We just need a jump start. We need that other car to come along and connect with us. Sometimes we provide the cables and sometimes they do. But the connection is made, their engine is running strong, and we borrow some of their life to resurrect our own.