An oil change and an attitude change

I pride myself on being a fairly intelligent woman; not the type to overlook important details. For example, the level of oil in my car.
My trusty gray Volvo had begun to make a funny high-pitched sound. Years ago I read ‘auto repair for dummies’ and although I didn’t learn how to fix anything, I did learn how my car works and I learned where certain parts of the engine were located. I know that a car is like a pet; you can’t just feed it and leave it, it also needs regular maintenance. I have learned from trial and error that it is a good idea to keep gas in the tank and how to change a flat tire. I also knew that it is important to check the oil and top it up.
I don’t really have a good excuse for why I haven’t checked the oil in months. I put it off, I guess. Every time I remembered I was already in the house or I was late for work or something like that. But the noise in the engine was getting insistently louder, and I knew it wasn’t a squeaky-fan-belt-noise or a grinding-transmission-noise or a worn-brake-pads-noise. I suspected I should check the oil.
I finally did last week and discovered to my horror that instead of the smooth sheen of oil on the end of the dipstick, there were clumps of brown gunk. Oh no.
Luckily my brother Sam was in town for the week. Luckily for two reasons: a) he knows all about cars and b) he doesn’t make me feel stupid for not knowing all about cars. I called him out to take a look at it and he groaned.
“You’re almost totally out of oil. You just took a few years off your engine’s life.”
He didn’t have to try to make me feel stupid; I did feel stupid.
“Put some 15-40 in right now.” He told me, “and get the oil changed as soon as you can. Hopefully it will be okay.”
The more I thought about my car running out of oil, the more embarrassed I felt. How could I have let that slip by? That definitely wasn’t the behavior of a truly intelligent woman. How could I remedy the situation?
I decided there was only one thing to do. I would change the oil in the car myself.
I drove to Lordco and went in and asked the woman at the counter for an oil filter for my ’87 Volvo. I felt quite smug at the look on her face.
“You’re going to change the oil yourself?” She asked disbelievingly.
“Of course.” I said. “It’s not rocket science.”
“Well, is your car a 740 or 760 series?” she asked. “A four or six cylinder?”
I suddenly wondered if my face showed my stupidity.
“A 740 series” I said slowly, “but maybe you’d better check the size for the 760 as well.”
I bought the filter and the oil and drove to my Dad’s shop. I parked my car in the back and spread cardboard under it and found a tray and waited for the engine to cool a bit, then I wiggled under with a crescent wrench and tried to loosen the bolt to let the oil out. It wouldn’t even budge. The wrench slipped off and I banged my hand on something and it started to bleed. Perhaps I was using the wrong type of wrench. I actually had no idea what type of wrench to use but I had this vague idea that if I saw the right one, I would recognize it. I went back into the shop and began to look through the drawers full of tools. Outside I suddenly heard a truck pull up and it was Luis, the very capable man who works for my Dad and seems to know the location of everything and anything. He came in and saw me standing there with nothing but a lonely look and a wrench.
“I’m changing the oil in the my car.” I told him nonchalantly. “I’m looking for a wrench but I can’t seem to find the right one anywhere.”
“You need a different kind.” He told me.
“Oh, I know that.” I said quickly.
He opened a drawer and pulled out a combination wrench. As soon as I saw it I knew that it was the right tool, of course.
I went back outside and wiggled under the car and tried to move the bolt but it wouldn’t budge.
“Come out.” I heard Luis say. “Let me try.”
I wiggled out and he squiggled under.
“Don’t do it all the way!” I shouted under the car. “I want to do it myself!”
“I just loosened it.” He told me as he slid out.
“How?” I asked curiously.
“I just tried a different angle, that’s all.”
He told me to put gloves on and I went back under the car and emptied the oil out and only got a bit on my forehead and a bit spilled out of the pan, but that was okay. Luis showed me how to hammer a screwdriver into the old oil filter and twist it off and I put the new one on. I recapped the bolt and put new oil in, and let the car run a minute and then put a bit more in. I filled up the windshield wiper fluid with water and poured 2 liters of antifreeze into the cooling system and closed everything up, got rid of the black oil, washed my hands, and put away the tools.
I thanked Luis for his help and drove away feeling very, very proud of myself. Seriously, how many girls do you know that can change the oil in their cars? Even though it wasn’t raining, I turned on the windshield wipers so I could see what a good job I’d done filling up the fluid.
But my joy was short-lived. The windshield-wiper fluid spraying up on the window was fluorescent green. It could only be one thing. I had poured the antifreeze into the wiper fluid reservoir and water into the cooling system.
I turned the car around and drove back to Luis.
“Look at my windows.” I told him. “Antifreeze. What do I do?”
He assured me that I hadn’t harmed anything, but I would just have to let the antifreeze run out and then refill the wiper fluid again. I felt suddenly deflated. I knew that the windshield wiper fluid reservoir was built into the frame of the car and I couldn’t just lift it out and get the antifreeze back; I would have to let it spray out.
I drove down the road with my wipers on and the spray on full-blast. But antifreeze is not like water; the very characteristics that make it ideal for preventing freezing in your engine also prevent it from evaporating in the air or on the windshield as you drive. I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw it jetting out behind me in a green mist. I slid down as far as I could in my seat and wondered what other drivers thought of someone who had their wipers on even though it was sunny, and had a trail of green liquid spraying behind the car.
Perhaps the whole experience would’ve turned out better if I hadn’t been so smug, I don’t know. Perhaps I should re-read ‘auto repair for dummies’, or at the very least, ‘auto maintenance for dummies’. Perhaps I will stay away from books entitled ‘Characteristics of intelligent women’ or ‘What antifreeze does to the environment’ or ‘How to act like you know it all when you actually know nothing’.

Love

I was working nursing the other evening and I walked into my patient Rory’s room to find his food tray untouched and him staring blankly at the wall.
“Aren’t you hungry?” I asked, offering him a cupful of pills.
His face suddenly began to crumble.
“How can you eat,” he asked, “when the person you love most in the world is dying?”
I noticed the balled-up tissues in his lap and suddenly I remembered reading in the nursing notes that his wife was dying in another hospital and he’d been taken to see her that day.
“You have no idea,” he said to me, “How much I loved her.”
And he began to sob. I knelt down on the floor and reached for his hand. I tried to think of something comforting to say but there was nothing and I just watched the tears pour down his face and stroked his hand.
“She is so beautiful.” He said between tears, “and I loved her so much”…
He couldn’t get many words out past that. I felt my eyes begin to fill up too and I just sat there for a long time and cried with him.
Later in the nursing station I mentioned him to one of the other nurses.
“He had thought his wife was having an affair with someone”, the nurse told me, “but then she was dying and he realized he didn’t care about anything anymore, he just loved her so much.”
I sat during my break and thought about Rory for the longest time. He was at the end of his life, and so was his wife, and the only thing that mattered to him was that he was losing the most precious thing in the world, which was her. There was nothing said in that room about his career, about his years in the military, about the fortune and fame he’d made. In the end all that remained was the person he loved.
I’ve been reading in Colossians about how a church should act. Clothe yourselves, Paul says, with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.
There is something so soft and tender about those verses. Don’t clothe yourself with success, with assertiveness, with good looks and fancy clothes and lots of money, with an illustrious career, with other people’s praises. Those things may all come by themselves. But God doesn’t look on the outside, he looks at the heart, and he looks at the way we love each other deep down inside. At the end of your life that’s all that will remain.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails….. these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.

Learning to serve

This morning my bible reading was from John 13:1-17 (read it!) about Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. The little meditation in my devotional book talked about serving and how Jesus set an example for us as Christians of how to serve. In order to become great, you must become a servant.
I was thinking about it and instead of my normal ‘Lord, help me in whatever I do today’, I prayed, “Lord, please give me the opportunity to serve someone today”.
I worked at Surplus Sam’s today, and the day started out pretty busy, working through a new shipment of merchandise that had arrived the week before and not been finished. I threw myself at it with gusto and sorted, priced and ran stock up the three flights of stairs to the main floor. There were lots of menial tasks to be done, like collapsing boxes, scraping labels off of chairs and taking out the garbage. But I didn’t mind; it was an opportunity to serve.
Sometime in the afternoon Austin paged me from the upstairs and asked if I could bring up some toilet paper as apparently the customer restrooms needed it. No problem! I could deliver toilet paper!
I carried an armful up and wove my way down the hallways to the bathroom. I opened the door and instantly my jovial attitude evaporated. The smell hit me like a wall. There was human excrement all over the floor and it had been tracked in by someone’s shoes. The toilet paper was out and the last person in had used paper towels and plugged the toilet. I gagged.
My heart’s desire at that point, my dear reader, was not to serve. It was to call someone else and tell them it needed doing and that I was not a regular employee anyway and I was in the middle of doing something downstairs. Oh, I had all the excuses ready.
But something in me remembered that scripture this morning. An opportunity to serve. I went downstairs again and collected the bucket of cleaning supplies and a jar of air freshener and I steeled myself for battle.
Once inside the bathroom again I began to gag convulsively. It was horrific. I almost vomited but of course that would have made things worse, so I tried to mouth breath and think beautiful thoughts.
I bleached that bathroom thoroughly and plunged the toilet and dealt with the garbage and put the mango air freshener in.
I came out of the bathroom and headed towards the basement and suddenly felt something funny. I felt great. Not as in feeling happy, but feeling as if I had suddenly become a greater person. In cleaning up that poop when no one else wanted to, I had transitioned from ordinary to great. I floated down the stairs.
There was a wool carpet needed unrolling and vacuuming, and I knew it was a dirty job. No problem! That’s just the job for a servant…..or someone great.

Did you know.....

I like to divide knowledge into four quadrants. There are the things I know and the things I don’t know, and then there are the things I know but don’t realize I know them, and things I don’t know but have no idea that I don’t know them. For example, in the first category, I know what medications to give for heart attack and I know that my Mom loves me. In the second category, I don’t know anything about ‘a tale of two cities’ (because I’ve never read it), I don’t know how to jumpstart a car, and I don’t know as much about God as I’d like. In the third quadrant, I didn’t know that I knew the way to superstore until I actually got there, and I also discovered that I knew a lot more Portuguese than I thought when I tried to translate a paper. Third quadrant knowledge is usually a pleasant surprise (“Oh, I DO know how to cook steak!”)
The problem lies in the fourth quadrant. Things we think we know but actually don’t. This week I discovered some of them and it was a bit of a blow to my pride.
I went to Kelowna to visit friends and family, as well as to have a bit of a break since just getting back from school. (Okay, mostly I just went to see a particular friend). For the first time in my life I went on a trip without bringing a textbook along. I didn’t even bring an educational book (besides the bible); instead, I brought my knitting.
I was asked if I would play the piano in church on Sunday and I agreed, and spent some time one evening with Robin Mercer practicing some songs. We tuned the piano and guitar together and worked on melodies and harmonies and rhythms. I’ve played piano for years and led worship in church for years and am quite confident in my abilities to play and lead and transpose and all that. We practiced for awhile and I felt okay about them, but I guess Robin was less sure because the next day he asked me if I would go over to Alan Karvonen’s house with him, to work on the music a bit more.
I had a headache and was overtired and pretty grumpy and tried to get out of it. “Do you really need me to come?”
Finally I agreed to go along but felt annoyed at the entire universe. We got to his house and sat down at the piano and got our music and all set to go. I began to play boldly along with Robin on guitar and suddenly Mr. K stopped me.
“Whoa, Heather.”
I lifted my hands off. Was I playing a wrong chord?
“Who’s leading here?” He asked me.
I paused for a second. “Robin is.”
“Well then, you need to let him lead. If he makes mistakes, that’s okay, but you’re just supposed to follow.”
I felt my face go red with embarrassment and then we started playing again.
He stopped me a little later and very graciously told me to hold back and wait for the guitar’s rhythm to come in first. He went out of the room to get a drink of water and I sat there for a long moment, staring at the music in front of me. Suddenly a fourth quadrant bit of knowledge hit me. I didn’t have the slightest idea how to follow.
My entire piano-playing career (which isn’t that illustrious), I’ve always led the music and never really had to follow someone else. At church and camp and parties and any other occasion where I’ve ever played music, I’ve always led. And suddenly, when I had to follow someone else’s musical style, I had not the faintest idea how to do it.
Mr. K came back and he was very gentle and gracious in the way he coached us and I felt like after awhile I was able to follow along a bit better. The next morning in church I was positioned behind Robin as he led and I was so determined to follow him properly that I kept my eyes fixed on his fingers where they encircled the neck of the guitar, and I held back until just the right moment, tried to feel where his rhythm was going and join in. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in playing music.
But I lay awake at night thinking about it. Perhaps it didn’t just extend to playing music. Perhaps it was a larger metaphor for life. Perhaps I actually don’t know how to follow. Being a good leader is important, yes. There was a Roman centurion in the bible who understood it well. His servant lay at home dying and he sent messengers to Jesus asking him to come and heal him. Jesus was on his way and the centurion sent friends to tell him not to bother coming- instead, just to say the word and the servant would be healed.
“I myself am a man under authority,” The centurion said, “with soldiers under me. I tell this one, ‘Go’, and he goes, and that one, ‘Come’, and he comes. I say to my servant ‘Do this’, and he does it’”.
The centurion understood what it meant to lead. But more than that, he understood what it meant to follow, which was why he was able to humble himself before Jesus in recognition of his power and position, and ask him to heal the servant. The bible records that Jesus was amazed at his faith and he healed him.
Well, to be honest, this theme hasn’t finished percolating in my heart (I like to mull over things for some time before they are complete thoughts), but for me, it was a bit of a surprise to discover something that I had no idea I didn’t know like that. It didn’t hurt matters either that in church on Sunday, the topic of the sermon was humility. I sat there thinking how gentle and how insistent the Lord is when he wants to tell us something, and feeling like I didn’t want to assert how much I knew anymore, until I found out just how very much I didn’t know.