Car Repairs East Rosebud – Munich 12-11-18 by Arlene Hendriks.

When my older son was in fourth grade, he and I took a winter trip to Montana. Well, when we left California, it wasn’t winter; it was April. Spring had sprung, and the grass was beginning to need mowing. Montana, on the other hand, was a different story. Winter was still holding most folks to the fireplace inside the house.

Nevertheless, as we were visiting with our long-term friends in Montana, the idea struck us to go to East Rosebud. This was one of our favorite hiking and camping spots when my husband and I courted, married and then lived in Montana. My friends were game for the trip even though the road into East Rosebud was a very primitive road even in the summer under good conditions. We set off early in the morning in our 1970 Plymouth sedan, with my friends. It was a bit tricky getting into East Rosebud, but we made it. We parked the car and set off for a short hike around the lake.

Returning to the car we piled in, ready for the trip back and a chance to warm up. As I turned the key to start the car all I got was a sound of it turning over but it wouldn’t start. My default response to any kind of trouble like that was always hopeless despair and anger. This was no exception. Here we are in the middle of nowhere, long before the days of cell phones, with no one anywhere near to offer help, and my car won’t start.

My friends, however, were used to Montana weather and well able to deal with problems that come up. Bazle jumped out of the car, opened the hood, fiddled around a bit and then said, “try to start the car”. I turned the key, and the car started right up! I was ready to shove it in gear and make tracks out of there, but my friend insisted that I get out, come and look under the hood with him so he could show me what to do if that ever happened again. My internal response was, “I don’t care how to fix the car, I just want God to not ever let this happen again.”

My perception of God’s care, protection and provision for me was that He would not let bad things happen. So, there was no need for me to learn how to fix this because it wouldn’t happen again if there wasn’t somebody to fix it. My friend, however, would not take no for an answer, so I found myself with a surly attitude, standing in the cold looking under the hood while he showed me how to take off the cover of the air filter by turning the wing nut on the top. Once the cover was off, we could see a piece of pipe sticking up from the center of the apparatus. He told me to stick my finger in that pipe and I could feel a little fluttery valve, appropriately called a butterfly valve, a little way down. He told me. “Sometimes that valve sticks and you have to loosen it, then put your hand over the top of the pipe while another person starts the car.”

With that lesson under my belt, we replaced the cover, tightened the wing nut and headed home. I let the lesson sink into the basement of my memory bank and the problem never recurred with that car. But my resentment over having to learn how to fix it in the first-place lay smoldering in the basement.

Fast forward 15 years to Munich, Germany. My young friend and I had taken a trip from Munich through Hungary and Czechoslovakia, then back to Munich in a Russian-made car called a Lada. This car had given us trouble every day of the trip. I figured the reason they called it a Lada was because when you try to drive it you have a Lada problems!

We finally arrived back in Munich where we stayed overnight at the home of a family who had been a host family for my young friend when she did a year of exchange student study in Germany. She was very bonded to these people, and I knew saying goodbye would not be easy for her. We talked the night before and I laid out the itinerary for the next day when she was to catch a plane to fly home. She was due to check in at the airport four hours away by 11 o’clock in order to catch her plane. I didn’t want to slide in just under the line, so I told her that we needed to be on the road, not just starting to say goodbye, but on the road by 6:30 the next morning. She agreed, and I headed for bed.

The next morning at 7:00 a.m. we were just leaving the house to head for the airport! Saying goodbye really was hard for her, because it seemed unlikely she would ever get back again. However, when we went to start the car, it wouldn’t start. The engine would turn over but not engage. The man ran back to the house to get his toolkit. He checked the spark plugs and whatever else you check whenever the car won’t start, but to no avail. Each time he said, “try to start the car,” the same turning of the engine met our ears but without it starting.

At one point the sound of the engine turning over without starting triggered in my mind another time when I had heard that same sound. Now, however, I was in a foreign country with a man who was from a different culture, and who knew something about car repair. I was not about to get out and say “Oh, by the way, I might know how to fix this!”

But as the minutes ticked on, I began to realize that we were going to be in serious trouble if something didn’t change and the man had clearly exhausted his knowledge of car repair. So I hesitantly went up to him and through my young friend as interpreter, I suggested that we might try removing the cover on the air filter. He quickly agreed to my suggestion and we opened the hood again only to find that this cover didn’t have a wing nut. It had a regular kind of nut on it, so he had to run back to the house to get a different wrench. The minutes were ticking on, and my despair and anger were rising. The man came running back, removed the nut, took off the cover and… there was no post sticking up. At that, I went back to sit in the car and put my head in my hands on the steering wheel.

My friend came back and asked me what I had expected to find. I told her what Bazel had showed me with my Plymouth years before. She went back up front, looked under the hood, poked around a bit and found the post recessed in the place where we had looked before. She stuck her finger down into the post, found the butterfly valve, and wiggled it around to get it loose. However, she couldn’t get her hand over it because it was recessed too far down in, so she got a rag and stuck it over the end of the post and held that in place with her hand. When I tried to start the car, it started right up! Everyone jumped into action. She grabbed the rag, they threw the cover on, tightened up the nut, gave quick hugs all around, and we sped off.

We raced to the airport, my friend grabbed her suitcases and ran for the door. She told me later it turned out she had five minutes after she checked in to get to her plane. She said she’d never run so fast in her life, but she made it and was soon winging her way back to the good old USA.

I, on the other hand, was now left to drive to northern Germany, where I was to spend a couple days with some people. As I was driving, I was still churning internally about the events of the morning. This trip to Germany took place in the winter, the next year after the story of Sally and Dave had happened in the summer. (see Chapter 2 of Treasures Out of Trauma) So it was not a surprise to me when I heard the Lord’s voice saying, “Why are you so angry?”

“Because we had to drive so fast to get to the airport, and we were almost late. If she had been late for this flight she would’ve had to pay a lot of money for a new flight home. The car should’ve been working. We’ve had trouble with that car every single day we’ve driven it. I’m tired of having trouble with this stupid car.”

“Was almost being late your fault?”

“No, it wasn’t my fault. It was Your fault. Why did you let the car malfunction in the first place? Why couldn’t we have just gotten in the car, driven off and got to the airport as we planned? Why didn’t You just make the car work?”

“Yes, I could have done that. But I had something else in mind.

 Why are you so angry about the car malfunction?”

“Because I want cars to work.”

“But why are you so angry? You were able to give the solution to the problem.    So why are you angry?”

“Because I don’t want to be a mechanic. I don’t want to know how to fix cars when there are men around who should know!”

“But why does it make you so angry?”

I’m a bit of a slow learner, but by this time I realized the Lord was after something. As I let myself feel the anger and pay attention to the thoughts going around inside my head, I realized that the idea of being able to fix a car fed into old wounds which led to an earlier sense of, “there’s something wrong with me”, and being masculine enough to know how to fix a car seem to feed into that high place of similar wounds.

With the words echoing in my head, “I don’t want to grow up to be a mechanic”, the Lord began to speak to me about His plans for my growing up to be a Godly woman with many skills, who trusts Him with every event and circumstance of my life. He disentangled the event of knowing how to fix that particular problem in a car from the “generalization” of its meaning that I was too masculine, and this was proof of what was wrong with me, and it was unfixable.

He explained to me that years before this event happened, He knew what His plans were at this time. And He prepared me before hand to be able to add the piece of information necessary to get the car running so that we would get to the airport on time, so that my friend would be able to catch her plane on time, so that I would know He was watching out on every moment of that trip, through all the car trouble, through all the being lost, He was there, leading us, guiding us, counseling us, guarding our hearts as well as our lives and helping us to stay calm and sort through what we needed to do to complete the task He had assigned us.

What an amazing transformation in my thinking! From that time on, “Pay attention to what you are thinking,” “Don’t believe everything you think!” have been God’s favorite way of getting at my stinkin’thinkin’ to transform my thought processes.

“Will you let Me direct your thoughts when you are troubled?”

“Yes, Lord, I want to listen to You instead of the one whose only agenda is to steal, kill and destroy.”

“Whatever things are true,…honorable,… just,… pure,… lovely,… of good report,… excellent,…worthy of praise,,, let your thoughts dwell there.”  ~ Phil. 4:6-8