Do worldly things rule us? What would be a reasonable perspective, as our Lord would see them? k
From the book, ‘The Last Lecture’ by Randy Pausch, a Professor (deceased), from Carnegie Mellon University; a chapter titled… ‘Lucy, I’m Home,’ p.85:
One warm day, early in our marriage, I walked to Carnegie Mellon and Jai was at home. I remember this because that particular day became famous in our household as the “The Day Jai Managed to Achieve the One-Driver, Two Car Collision.”
Our minivan was in the garage and my Volkswagen convertible was in the driveway. Jai pulled out the minivan without realizing the other car was in the way. The result: an instantaneous crunch, boom, bam!
What followed just proves that at times we’re all living in a I Love Lucy episode. Jai spent the entire day obsessing over how to explain everything to Ricky when he got home from club Babalu.
She thought it best to create the perfect circumstances to break the news. She made sure both cars were in the garage with the garage door closed. She was more sweet than usual when I arrived home, asking me all about my day. She put on soft music. She made my favorite meal… she did her best to be the perfect, loving partner.
Toward the end of our terrific dinner she said, “Randy, I have something to tell you. I hit one car with the other car.”
I asked her how it happened. I had her describe the damage. She said the convertible got the worst of it but both cars were running fine. “Want to go in the garage and look at them?” she asked.
“No”, I said. “Let’s just finish dinner.”
She was surprised. I wasn’t angry. I hardly seemed concerned. As she’d soon learned, my measured response was rooted in my upbringing. After dinner we looked at the cars. I just shrugged, and I could see that for Jai, an entire day’s worth of anxiety was just melting away. “Tomorrow morning,” she promised, “I’ll get estimates on the repairs.”
I told her that wasn’t necessary. The dents would be OK. My parents had raised me to recognize that automobiles are there to get you from point A to point B. They were utilitarian devices, not expressions of social status. And so I told Jai we didn’t need to do cosmetic repairs. We’d just live with the dents and the gashes.
Jai was a bit shocked. “We’re really going to drive around in dented cars?” she asked.
“Well you can’t have just some of me, Jai,” I told her. “You appreciate the part of me that didn’t get angry because two ‘things’ we own got hurt. But the flip side of that is my belief that you don’t repair things if they still do what they’re supposed to do. The cars still work. Let’s just drive ’em.”
OK, maybe this makes me quirky. But if your trash can or wheelbarrow has a dent in it, you don’t buy a new one. Maybe that’s because we don’t use trash cans and wheel barrows to communicate our social status or identity to others. For Jai and me, our dented cars became a statement in our marriage. Not everything needs to be fixed.
