Journeys

Back again to the blog after a few weeks' absence. As Londo said to Vir in Babylon 5, "Are you still here?" Oh well, you'd have to be a B5 fan to appreciate the nuances. Yes, I am still here. Still pastoring in my small-town church, still posting on the Internet.

In church-time, today is Palm Sunday and the beginning of Holy Week. This morning I was talking about journeys. Life journeys, physical and spiritual. Jesus' journey began in Bethlehem and ended on a hillside outside Jerusalem. I would posit that Jesus knew his journey was going to end in Jerusalem. The different gospels each put a different accent on it, but I see Jesus as moving around from place to place, one step ahead of the people who wanted to do him in because he was stirring things up and if he wasn't stopped, he just might cause a revolution and then the Romans would slaughter everyone to put a stop to it. Jesus would preach in a place for awhile, then things would get too hot and he would move on to another town. All the while, he was kind of dancing around Jerusalem. He knew he had to go there, for the final showdown with his enemies. And he knew that Jerusalem was their city, and they held all the power there, and in the end they were going to kill him. But he had to go there. In the end, he just couldn't put it off any longer.

Jesus was on a journey. And so are all of us. Our journeys may take us to some strange places, both physical and spiritual. There will be times when we will wonder how in the world we got where we are, when our original intention was to be...somewhere else.

I've been thinking about my own journeys this week. When I was forty, a lot of stuff happened in my life. I went through a very dark time for awhile. In the space of a few weeks in the late summer and early fall, a whole bunch of things happened. I had a friend, age fifty, who was undergoing treatment for cancer, and the chemotherapy had put her in the hospital with a serious infection; we didn't know if she would live or not. I lost another good friend to cancer around that same time; he was forty-five. He was the one who first suggested that I consider going into ministry.

But I wasn't in ministry at that time. I had a writing and editing business, and I was struggling to keep my head above water financially. (Don't ever start a writing and editing business unless you have a spouse who has a fulltime job and health insurance coverage for the whole family. I didn't. But that is another story.) I had one major client, and that client was downright abusive to me. The client wanted me to sign a new contract, the wording of which concerned me to the point that I hired a publishing lawyer to review it...and was told that yes, it was a bad contract and yes, I should ask for modifications. We negotiated, the client agreed to modify the contract, and then within a week, fired me. In the long run, being out of that abusive business relationship was a good thing, but in the short run, it was financially devastating.

My car was breaking down with Something Major about once a month. And I had a family member who was doing some squirrelly things that upset me very much.

All these things happened in one month, September 1992.

So, what did I do? Two weeks after my friend died of cancer, I went out and bought a red Camaro convertible. Talk about your midlife crisis. It was gorgeous. V-8 engine. Red leather seats. 25th Anniversary logo and accessories package. It was nothing less than my affirmation of life in the midst of death all around me.

I really did need a new car. But I could have bought reliable transportation for a lot less money. But there you go. That red Camaro and I did some serious traveling on my life's journey over the next few years. In 1996 I started seminary, and let me tell you, I had the only red Camaro convertible in that seminary parking lot.

But I was commuting 60 miles a day to school, and after a few years of that, the mileage was really adding up. Little Red started running up some major repair bills. And so I bought an all-American commuter vehicle: I got an SUV. Cupholders galore. Big side mirrors for driving the expressways at rush hour. Extra radio controls on the steering wheel. Lots of storage in the back for hauling 40-pound bags of topsoil and such. I called it the Bookmobile, because I kept all my seminary books in the back seat (who needs a locker?).

And I kept the Camaro. Not out of sentimentality, but because the dealership offered me an insulting amount on a trade-in. OK, maybe there was some sentimentality there.

At any rate...Little Red has been sitting in a garage for almost five years now. I hardly ever drive her anymore. I run the engine to keep the battery up, and every now and then I take her out. But after all those years of driving the SUV, getting back into that ground-scraping car with the teeny side mirrors scares me to death, to tell you the truth.

When I was recovering after my surgery, I couldn't drive for awhile. If you have ever had abdominal surgery and you think about how hard it is to get into a Camaro, you will understand. And so the battery went dead. And the car sat there.

Until a few weeks ago, when I decided to get the house painted. And the garage. Which meant I was going to have to get Little Red out of there.

The tow truck driver couldn't even jump her off. He had to push her out of the garage to the point where he could use the tow truck to pull her around the 90-degree corner at the garage and down the driveway. But we finally got her out of there and down to the dealership.

She needed more than a battery. Five years ago, during a storm, a pine tree branch went through the convertible top (fortunately no one was in the car at the time). And being laid up for five years is not good for a car. Some stuff had rusted, some stuff was leaking. I told the folks at the dealership to fix everything. And they did. The bill was approximately equal to a month's salary...or what I paid for my first Camaro back in 1975.

And so last week I picked up Little Red at the dealership in the city and drove her back to the small town where I pastor the church -- fifty miles. It was embarrassing that I had to hunt to find the window controls and the power door locks...and I still don't remember how to adjust the right side mirror. As I drove the 24 miles across the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, I noted how much faster you feel you're going when your rear end is scraping the pavement, and how much closer the side walls of the bridge look, than when I drive the SUV across.

But mostly I wondered what happened to that 40-year-old woman who bought the red Camaro convertible in September 1992, an affirmation of life in the midst of death, a financial craziness right after losing my best-paying client (but in the end the financial stuff worked out). What happened to her, and where did I lose her on the journey? When did this car, that I put 91,000 miles on all by myself, that at one time felt like an extension of my own arms and legs, become a terrifying thing to drive?

Maybe I need to drive Little Red around for awhile and see if that woman turns up again. Or if she's gone for good. And if she is, maybe I ought to sell Little Red. She's a collector's car now, probably worth a bit of money; they don't make Camaros anymore. But if that woman turns up, maybe I'll keep Little Red around awhile longer. And take her out of the garage more often.

What a journey. And not over yet.