Shaken, Not Stirred

The crazy thing is that this time I didn’t even realize I was stuck.

My 2017 Nissan Pathfinder was the nicest car I’d ever owned. I’m not a materialistic person at all. I wear hoodies and jeans most days. I don’t get my hair or nails done. I don’t care about designer anything, and let’s be honest; I live in a double wide with my amazing family. It’s not fancy, but it’s ours. It’s paid for, and it’s enough. We don’t live high off the hog, and that’s alright by me.

But this car was nice. It had leather interior and 7 seats. And a butt warmer. (Butt warmers matter when you live somewhere like Idaho, where winter lasts like half the year.) We bought it with the long game in mind; this was to be the family vehicle for years to come, an investment piece of sorts.

We purchased it at a shady used car dealership because that’s what we figured we could afford with the less-than-stellar credit rating we had acquired through a decade or so of questionable decision making, expensive custody battles, and other regrettable choices from which we continue to recover. It had a salvage title, which knocked the price down considerably, and though we grimaced when the finance guy told us our APR was some ungodly number like 19%, we bit the bullet and resolved to cope with the ramifications of our life choices.

It was a massive money pit from the start. Within a month, the Pathfinder needed a new timing chain and air conditioning compressor. A few months later, it broke down on the side of the road during our family vacation in Canada. It needed a new alternator. All of these repairs were supposed to be covered by the expensive extended warranty we had purchased, so it was a really special surprise to discover that our car was not even eligible for this warranty because of its salvage title.

I won’t continue to bore you with the tedium of the details except to say that, while the dealership ultimately covered the cost of repairs, it was an epic battle to get that done, and I lived in constant prayer that nothing else would go wrong with this big beautiful car.

And then came Thanksgiving and the idiotic (now very dead) suicidal deer. It was dark and foggy outside when we collided with it. All I remember was the darkness and fog, and the narrow shoulder on a hilly bank preventing me from opening my door without major effort. The tin of leftover green bean casserole I had been holding in my lap had crumpled up like an accordion on impact, my toddler was screaming in the back seat, and the receptionist with roadside assistance kept asking me questions I could not answer in the dark: “No, I cannot see if there is fluid leaking from my vehicle. I don’t have a flashlight, and I don’t want to be run over by a semi.” “No, I have no clue if there’s damage underneath the car.”

By the time we all made it home safely after frustrating conversations with insurance, car seat and kiddo transfers, and finagling with tow truck companies and ISP, I was pretty rattled. Glad to be alive, but rattled.

“Why?” I kept asking, forlorn. “Why did this have to happen?”

My husband tried to talk me off the ledge of my own despair. “It’s Idaho. There are deer here. This stuff just happens sometimes,” he assured me.

I was not particularly receptive of his assistance. I needed deeper meaning. I needed to see God’s hand and mind.

In my gut I already knew the car was totaled, but I didn’t want to face the music because I also knew insurance would need to give most of the payout to our lender and that we would be left with very little besides an undrivable vehicle and yet another impossible financial hill to climb. To say I was discouraged would be an understatement. I just felt like no matter how hard we tried to make wise, responsible choices for our family, we couldn’t seem to crawl out of the hole we had dug ourselves. And I started getting really anxious, and quite frankly, a bit depressed. It was affecting my joy.

I’ll skip right ahead to the part where we bought an even nicer car yesterday. A 2018 Ford Explorer with all the bells and whistles. Better reputation. More space. Butt warmers AND a heated steering wheel. No salvage title. And a comprehensive warranty we’re actually eligible to use.

But here’s the real kicker. When the finance guy was reviewing our applications, he was kind of astounded at the high APR we had been paying on our previous vehicle. Apparently we had been taken to the cleaners by the shady car dealership. Our APR is no longer 20%. It’s all the way down to 8%. Yes, I know this is still high for a lot of you with your ducks in a row, but that’s not us yet. We’re still working on it. And it’s a heckuva lot better than 20! More specifically, it’s what, in fact, we deserve to pay. So now we have a nicer car with better coverage and a lower monthly payment, and I’m not constantly holding my breath waiting for the next major mechanical malfunction or bracing myself for battle with the dealership to pay for it.

So why did I spend all these paragraphs boring you, dear reader, with the nitty gritty details of my car situation? The answer is that this blog isn’t really about my car at all. It’s about a principle that plays out time and time again in life, whether or not we slow down long enough to recognize it.

The truth is that a lot of times we can end up settling for a reality that’s beneath the standard of the life the good Lord wants to give us. We make peace with circumstances below our station, and we convince ourselves it’s what we deserve or that it’s good enough, and we ignore a lot of negative factors in order to uphold our belief that something fits when it doesn’t. We get ourselves stuck in ruts and patterns, but we don’t realize that we’re stuck because we’re so busy embracing it as good enough.

And sometimes God needs to pry our fingers open to empty our hands of the crap we hoard so that He can replace it with treasure that’s better suited for us. As C.S. Lewis put it,

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

Sometimes God has to shake us out of our apathy. And the shaking is uncomfortable.

I was really comfortable in my cushy job as Communications Director at the Y. It was no fun getting fired from a job I loved. But God had better, broader work for me that aligned with my hardwiring for justice. And it’s work I would never have discovered or even pursued on my own as long as I was comfortable in my cubicle. He had to shake me out of it.

And while I wouldn’t use the word “comfortable” to describe the agony of the rollercoaster that was my first marriage, I was fully committed to enduring all manner of abuse in order to make it work. At least I would still be married, right? I had settled for less than God’s best for my life. He had zero intention of allowing me to stay in that space. He was already preparing a loving husband for me—one who loved Jesus and valued my heart, one who would give me a beautiful son I would not otherwise know. I did not abandon the bad marriage of my own accord. I had to be rather violently shaken out of it.

I guess what I really want to communicate in this space is that sometimes when it feels like God’s allowing a hurricane to wreak havoc in your life, what’s actually happening is that he’s getting you unstuck. Unstuck from circumstances, jobs, relationships, vices, habits, and affinities that are not ultimately going to serve you or your best interest. It’s not always willful rebellion or poor stewardship of resources that keeps you stuck either. We don’t always know when our standards are subpar.

I remember being stunned when my best friend said she though the disruption of the COVID pandemic was delightful. It’s not that she celebrated death or economic distress or any of the negatives; it’s that she realized the disruption was a wonderful invitation to the world to recalibrate our standards of normalcy and make sure they were in alignment with what really matters. She welcomed the invitation to reconsider the merit of the 10 hour work day, to be innovative and resourceful, to evaluate our relationship with community and reassess our priorities. She saw the chaos as a giant (and massively overdue) reset button, an opportunity to shake off the maladaptive routines so many of us had inadvertently embraced without a further thought.

And she wasn’t necessarily wrong.

My husband grew up on a small farm in California, where his family harvested a number of things, including pistachios. When the pistachios ripened, they would have to bring in these big machines to violently shake the branches and knock the nuts loose. That’s how they gathered their harvest.

I think it’s that way with God, too. It’s hard to remember this in the middle of the storm, but He promised to work ALL things together for our good, including the storms. Sometimes we can’t access our fruit or glean our harvest without the shaking.