A couple of weeks ago I left my apartment before day break
to join the men of the Sheep Dip and Philosophical Society at Starbucks off
78. I was impressed by the turnout; we
took up three tables and even had to borrow chairs from the outside area to
seat everyone. The men gave me several
things to think about, but one comment stuck in my head and bounced around in
there all day. It was said that we need
to remember those times that we felt the presence of God in one of those
special moments and we should hold onto that feeling even in times of
despair.
That
made me think of a recent time I felt the presence of God in the most unlikely
of places. In my free time I work on
cars with my friends. I’ve been
wrenching on my own ride out of necessity since high school, and because I have
no mechanical knowledge or sensibilities, the hobby has introduced me to many
interesting people. A new race series
that is popular among car enthusiasts is the 24 Hours of Lemons, a spoof on a
historical race that occurs in France every year. The premise of Lemons is that each team of
four or five drivers has to buy and prepare a car for less than 500 dollars and
keep it running for roughly 16 hours broken into two sessions over a weekend. My friends and I bought an old Honda Prelude
off Craigslist, welded in a roll cage, and raced it in several events in
Houston and Dallas. In the Houston event
last summer our car was running great.
Somehow it survived to the second day, which is a feat of mechanical
know-how, or a miracle, I’m not sure which.
As the cars took to the track early that morning I climbed up on a tower
towards the back of the track with a radio and a cup of coffee so I could watch
the traffic for our driver. As I sat up
there on the platform with my legs hanging off the edge and a Styrofoam cup of
coffee in my hand, I had a special moment.
As I looked out at the old junkyard cars running around on a racetrack I
thought about the creativity of the engineers who had designed and built these
cars ten, twenty, sometimes thirty years ago.
This is the creative nature of God that has been implanted in all of
humanity. I thought about all the hours
that these people racing had put into fixing these cars, repairing broken
engines, painting up the body panels to look like real race cars, and I thought
about the inherent humor and ingenuity that lives in every child of God. I reflected on the time I had spent with my
friends prepping our little Honda, painting it neon green, driving it together,
and I realized I was working in harmony with other creatures of God.
God is everywhere. God’s work can be seen in the faces of our
neighbors, the hands of the worker, the humor of a joke on the radio, the
colors of paint on a billboard, and everywhere else that our creative minds
have been put to use. Maybe it’s
something obvious to everyone else that I somehow missed, but that moment I had
while sipping coffee and watching old cars run around a track changed my
perspective.
That’s my thought from the road
this morning. Check back later this week for news from our Thursday night study.
Like life itself, we sometimes run into each other and bend fenders, scrape paint and sometimes blow an engine. I had a special moment just reading this. Even in those times, God wants us to use our creative abilities to keep trying.
ReplyDeleteWe read your blog in Sunday School and we enjoyed reading it! This week we will make a point to recognize those special moments in our own lives.
ReplyDelete`FUMC Sachse Youth Sunday School